Just hit a great milestone for me, doing a set of 20 handstand pushups without break. Here’s the video:
Before the form police start commented, realize that I am doing these this way on purpose.
These were done in what I like to call “Easy” form. Most notably the hand position is wider than shoulder width which reduces the range of motion, though some other details distinguish this from “Medium” or “Hard” versions. All of these are done without changing the range of motion by raising the head up or the hands. Those are also great things to do, but different.
Lately, I’ve been aiming to hit sets of 20 in many exercises as a graduation benchmark on that. You can read more about this max set progression here.
Far more detail on how form changes the difficulty of handstand pushups, plus how I train this king of bodyweight exercise, can be found inside The Ultimate Guide to Handstand Pushups.
Comments
Good job Logan. I also like to use 20 reps as a benchmark for upper body assistance exercises (such as dips) to know I can increase the difficulty. And for my main pushing exercise (right now it’s Z press), I use a table of weights and reps with equivalent intensity (1RM equivalent), and I choose a range of 1 to 20 reps as well. I exclude from the list combinations that take more than 20 reps to achieve the right intensity, and I pretty much never go below 4-5 reps, and make sure to use higher rep ranges as well.