One-armed pushups? Child’s Play. One-armed chinups? I don’t sweat that. Blowing up a car with your mind? Amateur hour. You want a real challenge then pay attention to the Planche Pushup.

It’s basically a normal pushup, except your feet aren’t on the ground ha. The only two contact points your body has with the ground are your hands. If that’s not making any sense, then check out this planche pushup progression video.I just found out about these a couple of weeks ago and they look intense. I think Nash and I are going to try to follow the progression in the above video, or something similar, and see how long before we can actually pull off one of these bad boys.

In order to keep my muscle development balanced, I normally wouldn’t focus on training for one body part, or for only one exercise, but this is a little bit of an exception and will be in addition to my normal workouts and not in place of.

Since the pushup is such a proven and trusted exercise, which really does work many different body parts (especially with different hand positions and foot elevations) I don’t feel bad about training to do a harder version of it, because it almost becomes a full body workout at that point. Every “core” muscle you have is going to be working to balance you and keep your legs elevated. Also, your chest, shoulders, triceps, biceps, forearms, are all going to be getting to killed while trying to push you up and keep you balanced at the same time, your upper back might even get a bit of a workout too.

I just started “training” for this within the past couple of days. The “pseudo pushup” is really a piece of cake, you’re just doing a regular pushup, only your hands are positioned down more towards your waist. This is where your hands are going to need to be positioned if you have any hope of balancing yourself well enough to do a planche, so it’s important to get proper form and technique, and to start getting your muscles used to the new movements and positions.

I dabbled with the second stage of the progression (being a wall-aided planche) and it’s definitely a little awkward. Figuring out where your feet should be, how much you should or shouldn’t rely on the wall, and having your feet slipping and sliding everywhere all take some getting used to.

I’ll continuously post updates as a reach more advanced stages in the progression, but for now I’m opening the door to the yogymbo planche pushup challenge. If you can do them, or want to try them, or have any questions, or anything else for that matter, leave a comment.

One last note…really make sure you work your upper and lower back if you’re going to train for these. That just goes back to making sure you have a balanced workout routine and aren’t neglecting any part of your body.