For several months, I did Pike Pushups as a progression exercise nearly everyday to build up the strength for Handstand Pushups. I documented that journey in great detail in a 3 part series here. And since I got intimately acquainted with this exercise, I am ready to share a ton of tips to help you succeed with it too! I will point out what is proper form & how to set yourself up for consistency.

Pike pushups are more technical to setup and execute than expected

Changing any single one variable can make the exercise seem a lot easier or harder so having a consistent setup is crucial for success. And because it’s a difficult exercise, it’s easy to do it with bad form without even realizing the body is taking shortcuts. Some people find pike pushups so frustrating to master that they resort to doing the barbell equivalent, the overhead press, because they can incrementally increase the load on the bar with far fewer variables to deal with. I’m here to help you to not experience that frustration.

Pike pushups done with proper form are deceptively hard.

I mean like, really hard. It’s very difficult to perform them with proper form. Be warned, most demonstrations on YouTube are shown with poor form.

• And the reason for that is simple:
• Ask any fit man to “drop and give me 20!” Most would be able to pull those pushups off.
• But to do 20 decline pike pushups with the feet elevated? Most would be lucky to do a few with proper form!

Obviously they’re not the same exercise, but they are both pushups and have minimal equipment requirements and thus, provide a low barrier to entry, which means less excuses for you to work on them!

How to do Pike Pushups with Proper Form

Form Check #1: Just like with normal pushups, the elbows should not be flaring out to the sides at all

Since this is a progression exercise toward handstand pushups, it’s important to note that a real handstand pushup will never be performed with the elbows flaring outwards. As such, during pike pushups, the forearms or elbows shouldn’t be moving backwards or flaring out to the sides as well. They should remain vertical and fairly static. (To facilitate this, turn the hands out slightly so the index finger faces forward. You can even make it more extreme so the thumb faces forward if your wrists are bothered.)

Form Check #2: Your head should go MUCH MORE FORWARD than you think is enough

This is probably the #1 offender of all people: they dip their head down to go between their hands. No. Stop that. The head should not go down between your hands. The head should go forward and down. So far forward that your head ends up ahead of the fingers. So far forward that the elbows don’t move backwards whatsoever but maybe they even go forward a teensy bit when you’re even stronger. When in doubt, go more ahead than you think you can. (In any harder variation, like a hollow back press or bent arm planche, your head will need to go even more forward.)

What happens if you put your head straight down between the hands? The elbows flare out to the sides and it increases the strain on the elbow and shoulder joints. You’ll be able to do more reps with this improper form, misleading you to think that you’re stronger than you actually are. (Remember, this exercise is deceptively hard when done right.)

Form Check #3: Your nose should touch the ground

Rather than aiming for the top of the head to touch the ground, have the nose touch it. You get more range that way.

How To Set Yourself Up For Consistency

Setup Tip #1: Start with (Feet-Elevated) Decline Pike Pushups

Doing pike pushups with feet on the ground is OK but I suggest you start with decline pike pushups where the feet are slightly elevated. This will mitigate any hamstring flexibility issues and make the exercise feel less awkward. Even if the flexibility is not an issue, I highly recommend it. Also, one should be comfortable with regular pushups. If you have been doing them properly, the way I recommend, then you have a solid base.

Setup Tip#2: The hands should be about shoulder width apart

Setting the hands wider than shoulder width will feel easier because there’s less range of motion. Setting the hands narrower than shoulder width will feel very difficult and is an advanced variant. Keep the hands at around shoulder width apart for optimum range and intensity.

Setup Tip #3: Choose an object you could elevate your feet on and stick to that height

I put my feet on a chair (about knee height) and did that for 6 weeks minimum before elevating the feet onto the couch (about hip height).

The difference between the above settings for the feet is only ~6% which doesn’t sound like much, but it is considering the lower setting is already quite difficult at ~77% intensity so don’t start at the highest possible setting. This exercise is humbling. The height of the feet should be the same for a while.

Setup Tip #4: Place the feet near the edge of the platform

When I was using a chair, I would make sure my feet were placed right near the edge of the chair. If I placed the feet further back, toward the middle of the chair, the exercise would be far easier. (When I elevated the feet to hip height, I was using the side of my couch. Luckily, arm-rest was narrow so I couldn’t set my feet too far back or forth.)

Setup Tip #5: If using a movable object to put your feet on, always place them in the same spot.

When I was using a chair, I would place the legs of the chair exactly at the edge of the carpet each and every time. Then, my feet would go at the end of the chair and my hands would go on the same spot on the carpet everytime. And finally, when doing the actual pushup, my nose would always hit the same spot on the carpet as well.

Setup Tip #6: Use a landmark for where your nose should touch for each and every rep.

Do this to ensure you’re going forward enough. On the carpet, I chose a pattern to aim for. One inch forward or backward makes a huge difference so I always made sure I was going forward enough. On a smooth floor, I use a piece of invisible tape to mark the spot.

Setup Tip #7: The distance of the hands from the feet should always be the same.

Setup the hands close enough to almost be an L-shape, but not tighter than an L-shape. (This was a distance of about 36″ (1 meter) for me. Your mileage may vary.)

Setup Tip #8: Don’t place the hands too close to your feet even if your flexibility allows for it.

The closer you bring the hands to the feet, the harder the exercise becomes. So you might think closer is better to maximize the intensity. But it’s not the best course of action for consistency sake because placing your hands further back makes the exercise exponentially harder as mere millimeters change the load significantly. If your hamstring flexibility and pike compression is great and you can compress yourself tighter than an L-shape, you may be tempted to make the exercise harder by simply moving your hands backwards, but the inconsistency can cause frustration and make you think you’re weak, so don’t do it.

Note: I’m not saying you should NEVER bring your hands close. Eventually, you will be able to place your feet close to your hands, do a pike pushup and lift your feet up and press up into a handstand. You can even “teeter totter” like that if you stay piked and are obscenely strong. But you need to choose a setting that’s going to help you get the reps in.

More Tips for Success

1. Warmup with wall facing scapular wall slides with protraction as well as palm pulses and wrist pushups for wrist work in the morning.
2. To help you get through the tough reps, grip the floor like a madman and it will help you generate more strength.
3. Don’t forget to breathe. Exhale on the way up. Inhale on the way down. You can experiment with the reverse as well but most importantly, don’t forget to breathe.
4. Drop-set trick for the last rep: If you know you’re definitely going to fail the next rep if you go for it, put your hands half an inch or an inch forward and you’ll be able to complete it. I only recommend this for emergencies so don’t overuse this trick. A lot of the times when you’re nearing the final rep, it is psychological whether you can complete it or not, so don’t give in thinking there’s no way you’re going to make it just because the previous one was a real slow grind. Don’t sell yourself short.
5. If your lower back feels strained, squeeze your glutes! During the ascent, the lower back will tend to arch. Eventually, when you do HSPU’s, with no L-shape, your hips will be in a neutral position the entire time and you will need to squeeze your glutes the entire time anyway, especially as you press up as your lower back will collapse if you are not firm there. So it’s a good habit to squeeze the glutes.  (This is also a bit tricky as the glutes are hip extensors and when pressing up and returning back into the L-shape, that’s hip flexion. So you may feel you’re fighting against the natural pathway, which you are, so don’t overdo this and only do it if you feel strain on the lower back.)
6. Elevate your hands on anything to increase range. You can use yoga blocks, parallettes, decline handstand blocks or stairs so your head goes “below” the floor to increase your range.

Tempo Tips

• Don’t rush the negative phase
  • Slow down the negative phase so it takes a solid 2-3 seconds rather than just one second or less. In doing so you build more strength and make better use of your time.
• Pause at the bottom occasionally to reduce the stretch reflex
  • This strengthens you in the hardest part of the exercise and forces you to press up using all your strength without utilizing the elastic nature of your muscular tissues because you made all the potential energy dissipate from pausing.
• Explode up
  • Press yourself up as fast as possible with perfect form. In the beginning it was hard to push quickly. It was actually impossible. But the intention is what matters. I tried to pushup as fast as possible and although it was slow, it got slowly faster. It wasn’t until exactly one month into the training where I was pushing actually faster for the first time during the concentric phase. After 3 months, I could feel the quality of my strength had changed dramatically. I could muster through reps where otherwise it would’ve failed in the past and perform the concentric faster than ever.

To recap…

• Don’t flare your elbows.
• Send the head and shoulders forward and down, not just down.
• Make sure your nose boops the ground, not the top of your head.
• Hands shoulder-width apart.
• Elevate your feet on something and stick to that.
• Place feet at edge of platform and hands far enough to make an L-shape, but not closer.
• Use carpet patterns or wood grain (or tape) as target landmarks for hands and nose.
• Take 2-3secs to go down, pause at the bottom sometimes and always explode up.

So there you have it! Your comprehensive guide toward tackling the pike pushups! If you have any questions, please let me know! And if you have not read the 3-part series on how I used them to gain the strength for the Handstand Pushup, click here to do so!

The One Arm Pull Up (or One Arm Chin Up) was never a goal of mine until very recently and I’d like to talk about my foray into this journey. The r/bodyweightfitness forum goes through seasons where the userbase brings up the same theme repeatedly and it has been very pulling-oriented for the past year. Last year it was all about Pavel Tsatsouline’s Fighter Pullup program (detailed below) and recently there’s a lot of talk about one-arm training. The userbase is collectively getting stronger and it’s infectious in the most positive way. It is now a goal of mine to do a pullup or chinup with one arm for the sheer fact that it will make me much stronger at pulling in general.

My Recent Pullup History

Near the end of 2017, I did “Pavels Fighter Pullup” program where you slowly increase the number of pullups you’re doing day after day and it has been proven to be beyond effective. I shared a detailed log of my experience here but the gist of it was the following:

I went from being able to do 18 pullups (in a day) to 39 pullups in exactly two months time. The program was supposed to be done in a month but I did it in two months cause I kept surfing and swimming and doing other shit in between so I had many more”rest” days. (I’m never in a rush and not going to follow a program blindly when my body is saying you need rest, especially because swimming is already extremely upper back intensive.)

What is Pavels Fighter Pullup Program?

Why does Pavels Fighter Pullup Program work so well?

Well it’s very simple, really. Let’s say you can do 5 pull ups. So you begin with 5-reps which is at or near the max of what you can normally do. Then you’re resting as much as you need to (anywhere from a few minutes to few hours) and the next time you’re only doing 4 reps, which is less than before, so psychologically it feels very achievable (especially cause you’ve rested plenty) so you can’t psyche yourself out. And you do that until you’ve done 5 sets. And the next day, all you need to do is add only ONE rep on only ONE set, so it’s not very difficult at all. But you’re getting way more reps in… and it’s building week after week… and next thing you know two months goes by and you’re starting at 14 pullups and you’re like WTF I’M A BEAST.

My Current Pulling Strength (as of August 2018)

For many years I’ve maintained basic, decent pulling strength. I can do ring muscle ups, L-Pullups and V-Pullups quite easily at any given time. And while this is definitely above-average strength relative to the general population, this is barely intermediate-level for what’s possible with calisthenics or bodyweight exercises.

And in my previous blog post, I wrote partly about how I was constantly holding (single-leg) front levers at home in between computer breaks in the months of June and July. This is relevant cause the front lever is a straight-arm pulling exercise that fatigues the same muscle groups as pullups.

Given how difficult it is, I’m super happy with my current level as I can pull into it from a dead hang and into inverted hang repeatedly (it’s hardest to pull into it from a dead hang). Here’s a video demonstration after doing heavy pulling work for 5 days with no rest days (turn speakers on for the funny bit):

Building Pulling Strength Beyond Basic Pullups

Since I had such a great time doing Pavels Fighter Pullup Program last year, I decided to apply the structure of it to towel-assisted One Arm Chin Ups. According to Mathew Zlat, he says that many OAP/OAC video tutorials are incorrect because the people explaining how to achieve them have not achieved them themselves and in his video he says that most teach the assisted-version incorrectly because they don’t put the towel or band directly under the pulling arm. Doing it directly under the pulling hand mimics the rotation and pull just like true one arm versions.

Below is me performing some Towel-Assisted One Arm Chin Ups. You can do these with either a shirt, towel or band (band not recommended though cause it’s non-linear):

ProTips: It’s very easy to overdo reliance on the assisting arm, so only initiate the pull with the non-assisting arm and use the assisting arm only as much as you need. When going down, don’t freefall down, instead try to resist going down as much as possible (and again, use the assisting arm as little as necessary).

The other exercise Zlat recommends are negatives. I cannot do negatives at all. So my goal for this training cycle is to continue progressing the assisted version until I can do at least 1 controlled negative on each arm. (Note: You can intensify the towel-assisted version by simply holding the lower end of the towel and/or using the assisting arm less.)

Training Log for my Towel-Assisted One Arm Chin Ups:

I started with 15 reps (5,4,3,2,1 on August 3) and 2 weeks later I am at 23 reps (6,5,5,4,3). My fingers are fried to hell from gripping the towel. This is inadvertently strengthening a huge weak point for me: my fingers. So it’s like I’m training two goals in one. (It’s interesting to note how varied grip strength can be. My one-arm-grip is amazing on the rings (1+ minute hang per arm!) but poor for performing the rope climb, which the towel mimics.)

I am extremely wary of the signals my fingers are giving me.

My fingers are very sore from gripping the towel and that warning sign is not to be ignored because the tendons of the fingers are tiny and take a lot of time to recover. If this strain becomes a tendon rupture, it will take more than a year for a finger to recover, so I have two options here:

Continue training the assisted-one arm pullups…

1. But instead of using a towel, hold onto a shirt or sarong or band as it’s not as taxing on my fingers.
2. But instead of doing the fighter pullup program (which has a constant increase in volume), stay at this level of sets and reps and apply a steady state cycle to it where the sets/reps are the same for 2 months. The intensity stays the same the entire time which allows for the tendons to recover and catch up to the muscles.

For now, I choose the first option because using a sarong isn’t taxing on my fingers as much as gripping a towel, so I am going to continue the fighter pullup program using that instead of a towel. If my fingers become painful again, I will reassess the condition and update this post.

A Note About Safety of One Arm Work

One Arm Pullups & Chinups are NOTORIOUS for causing elbow pain if the exercise is rushed through. This exercise is very hard on the joints and it seems as though most people run into some sort of elbow issues when training for it, especially when they get to one-arm negatives, because if they run out of energy to control the descent, they propel rapidly down into a dead hang on one arm, which fucks your elbow up, especially in a supinated/chin-up position.

One Arm Chinup (OAC) versus One Arm Pullup (OAP), which is easier?

• Chinup mean the palm faces you (supinated).
• Pullups are when the palm faces away from you (pronated).
• Many people find chin ups to be slightly easier than pullups.

So following that logic, you’d think that a One Arm Chin Up (OAC) would be easier than a One Arm Pullup (OAP), right? But reality says otherwise: The reason for this is that on a bar, a one-arm dead-hang with a supinated grip (chin up grip) is very difficult and awkward to hold as opposed to the pronated grip, so initiating a OAC is very difficult and most don’t actually start from a dead hang on a bar. So if you are using rings, train the OAC first because you can start in a neutral position and end in a OAC. If you’re using a bar, train the OAP first.

This drives home the importance of knowing who you are taking advice from. Hopefully advice from someone who has been there and struggled throughout the process.

If you read the old GymnasticBodies forums, that forum was full of people constantly regurgitating whatever everyone else was saying: Everyone who never had a One-Armed-Anything, said that the natural route is to learn OAC first, then OAP. And those who had the actual achievement said OAP is easier but they were drowned out by the noise of others saying otherwise. Those few people saying the truth were on-point but you wouldn’t be able to know it given how firmly and eloquently the others were saying that OAC should be learned first and because they were going against the hive-mind.

Also, I won’t name any names, but there were many people on that forum who acted like they knew everything, but years later I found them on Instagram and realized that these people were and still are novices in their abilities and all that talk was literally just regurgitated talk from others. Yet on the forum, masked behind a cryptic username, they were speaking of elite moves as if they had been there, done that. So it goes to show you, there’s great merit to taking advice from someone who you know has achieved the actual goal you’re after and has gone through the process through and through. There are also some athletes who have achieved some difficult moves without ever training for it in an optimal way. These people are often not the most qualified to give advice to those struggling as well, cause they somehow cheat-coded their way past all that (often extremely lean and short individuals have a fantastic power to weight ratio). That is why I feel my height and weight is a blessing in disguise. I am not short, nor too light, and thus progress takes longer with the harder moves in calisthenics, and thus, I gain more experience figuring out how to bridge gaps in progression exercises and thus, can pass more knowledge onto others who are struggling at any phase of their journey.

Soooo… long story short: I’m currently working on towel-assisted One Armed Chinups using pavels fighter pull up rep scheme, but I am working on the pullup version instead because it’s counter-intuitively easier (on a bar), and if my fingers or joints yell at me, I will instead implement a steady state cycle to ensure my joints don’t run into any issues as well. The goal is to be able to do this until I get to slow and controlled negative One Arm Pullups.

Part 2 Incoming!!!

In part 2 I will talk about why I ultimately ended up choosing to do One Arm Pullups instead of One Arm Chinups as the initial goal, dissect the form in detail between the two, and talk about the internal progression of not only increasing the number of reps, but also increasing the eccentric phase and lightening the grip of the assisting arm as other forms of progression, numbers aside.