Pyramid Pushups | Fitness & Feta

Yesterday was a good day. Just wanted to share some mentionable things from my Monday!

— I made it to the gym by 6:10am. On Mondays, this doesn’t always happen for me (it’s so hard after the weekend!), but yesterday I was determined to have some extra free “me” time at night. I did the 3-2-1 cardio workout on this week’s Best Body Bootcamp plan. For some reason, I’m not sick of the treadmill yet despite doing a few runs last week, so my workout ended up looking like this:

My cardio was 35 minutes total, but depending on how many intervals of 3-2-1 you decide to do, you could make this as short or long as you want. I think I maybe could have even gone a bit faster with my miles per hour, but I didn’t want to push it on my foot! After my run, I did my pyramid pushups for day 1 of my April Arms Challenge, and I also did some ab work.

— Speaking of pyramid pushups, I got lots of fun feedback from them! Check out some of these tweets:

@MelKrack: Ending the day with @fitnessandfeta’s #aprilarms pyramid pushups. Holy wtf was that?!
@EricaJeanC: Just finished day 1 of @fitnessandfeta #AprilArmsChallenge! Really felt the extra work on the shoulders. Can’t wait for day two!
@Ready2GetSweaty: Day 1 – April Arm’s Challenge complete! @fitnessandfeta’s pyramid pushups after 100 in crossfit were just wonderful 🙂
@berubeka: Holy burn from push-up ladders @fitnessandfeta #AprilArmsChallenge
@mes613: @fitnessandfeta just completed Day 1 of #AprilArmsChallenge! #gettingafterit #monday #gunsout
@achachi12: Sore from Day 1 #AprilArmsChallenge! Looking forward to completing the month!

Keep ’em coming you guys! Hope you guys ROCK your triceps superset today.

— Last night I did my Sunday food prep a day late because I just didn’t feel like doing it on Sunday night after spending the day at Tim’s aunt’s house for Easter. In this week’s prep is grilled chicken, frozen Greek yogurt bars, hard-boiled eggs, cottage cheese with strawberries and slivered almonds (I’m really changing it up with strawbs instead of bluebs), grapes, unsalted cashews, a couple regular salads, and a southwestern inspired shrimp quinoa that I actually threw together without a recipe.

— While I food prepped, Tim made dinner and it was AWESOME:

I had seen a recipe in a blog a few weeks ago (forget which blog) for stuffed sweet potatoes, and this is what Tim came up with. I’ll post the recipe soon! I can’t wait to eat that second one for dinner tonight.

— Last night I also participated in my very first Twitter chat with some other Best Body Bootcamp participants. Tim came home and said, “Um are you in a chat room?” I guess I kind of was? It was great though! What an awesome community of people, and now I actually understand how Twitter chats work. Very cool.

Anything mentionable from your Monday!? If not, perhaps a terrific Tuesday is in store!

Can’t wait to be back to Two A Day tonight!

Last weekend Tim and I went for a run, and afterward we did some core work in our apartment. We rarely get to work out together anymore since we work different hours. Plus, he prefers working out later at night once the peak hours crowd has died down a bit. Anyways, as we were finishing up our ab work in the living room, Tim asked me why I haven’t done pyramid pushups in a while.

OMG I forgot all about pyramid pushups. And by “in a while,” Tim meant in YEARS. I used to teach them when I taught outdoor bootcamp. Like all the time. Maybe every week. It’s actually kind of hard to believe that outdoor bootcamp days were years ago now.

Anyways! I need to share the wonders of pyramid pushups with you guys. Tim actually taught me this move when we started dating ~~and he was trying to impress me~~. I guess his soccer team used to do them all the time.

It’s pretty self-explanatory: basically you switch back and forth between doing a pushup (your choice on modified versus regular pushups) and doing a seated overhead arm raise (without weights to start), working your way up to 5 reps and back down again as you alternate between the two moves. For the seated overhead arm raise, you simply raise your arms up overhead and then lower them so they look like this:

Pardon my sweaty drenched back.

The key to making pyramid pushups effective is switching up the tempo. And slowing them down. So many people tend to just rush through reps, which actually can be less effective then slow and controlled movement. So after you do your pushup, hold it there in your straight-arm plank a little longer than you normally would. Or maybe you do a few quick reps in a row, but then do one slow one and hold your arms down with your elbows in line with your shoulders.

This may be harder to do on your own, because I feel like you get better results if you have someone all drill sargeant-ish telling you when to switch, but give it a whirl anyways. Just be your own drill sergeant. And fellow instructors… do this in your classes. If you are like me, you’ll appreciate the grunts of your class around rep 4 on the way up as they realize these aren’t as easy as they sound. They’re a shoulder burner.. for sure!

Hey class, think we can do 10?! How about weighted?

We’ll work up to it.

Ever done pyramid pushups before? Did you do them with me years ago? If you haven’t tried them yet, leave a comment if you do. I want to know how they go!