Pushups on the Ball
Starting
Position
- To start the pushups
on the ball exercise kneel in front of the ball and place your hands
about
shoulder width apart.
- Get up onto your toes.
- Pull your shoulder
blades down and back.
- This is the position
you attained in the
plank
on the ball on your toes. If you
haven't attempted that exercise yet, I recommend you master it before
going on to try this one.
- Keep
yourself straight from your head to your heels.
- It is important to
engage
your abdominals
prior
to moving
Action
- Lower
your chest to the ball slowly.
- Slowly rise back
up to the starting position.
Prime
Movers
- Pectoral muscles,
deltoids, triceps.
Physio
Tips
- Start
slowly and be sure to maintain correct form at all times.
- if you feel you can't
lower yourself all the way without losing control of your trunk or
shoulders, start with just a partial pushup. Start with lowering
yourself just 4 inches and then push back up. You can increase the
amplitude of your pushup as you gain strength and control.
- To
protect your neck, keep your chin tucked and squeeze
down as though you were holding a grapefruit between your chin and your
chest. Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth to assist in
stabilizing your neck.
- If you experience any
shoulder pain, stop.
- If you find this
exercise too difficult try Knee Push ups on Ball,
or go back
and work on static exercises -
Plank
on the ball - on knees, Leaning Straight,
and Single Arm Lean.
Progression
Try
any of the following strategies to make the above exercise more
difficult:
- Try
pushups on the ball with your feet on a stable stool or a BOSU
(half ball).
- Add more air to your
exercise ball, decreasing the area of contact with the floor and
increasing instability of your pushup surface.
- Start the exercise
with your feet closer together to narrow your base of support.
- Try keeping one leg
straight up behind you as you do the pushup so that you have only one
foot supporting you. This leaves only two points of contact with the
floor, and one is mobile!
This exercise is a natural progression of the straight armed plank on
the ball. It is essentially a plank in motion. Throughout our day we
are involved in activities that involve movement. If we can only
maintain spinal stability when we are not moving, how functional is
that? Here we have a static, stable, spine and we introduce limb
movement in a closed kinetic chain.
Because we are weight bearing through our shoulders we activate all the
shoulder stabilizing musculature as well - the rotator cuff, and
scapulothoracic muscles.
To make this exercise ball exercise easier you can do any of the
following:
- Put the ball up on a
wall so you are pushing up against the ball 4 or 5 feet up from the
floor against the wall. This is like a
wall
pushup.
- Prop your exercise
ball into a corner on the floor to reduce wobbliness of your pushup
surface.
- Take some air out of
your exercise ball to increase the area of contact your ball has with
the floor.
- Try using a bigger
ball. The more vertically your are oriented, the easier the exercise
becomes.
- Prop your feet against
a wall behind you to prevent yourself from slipping away.
Here are some other exercises that work shoulder stability as well as
trunk stability:
Floor Side Plank
Scapular Pro/Retraction
Static Side Leaning
Dynamic Leaning
Rolling Plank
Pike
Ball Walkout
Repeat pushups on the
ball 6
times.
Repeat this ball
exercise 10
times.
Repeat this ball
exercise 15
times.
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