Are Push ups Good For Basketball?

Pushups are a great exercise for basketball players looking to build overall upper body strength, they are great at targeting the triceps, chest, shoulders, and even the core. Which are some of the primary muscles you need in basketball, especially for shooting. However, as a player advances in their training and lifting career, you should move to more weighted exercises.

Who Should Do The Pushup

The pushup should be done by any player who either is starting out in their lifting career or a player who struggles to lift their own body weight.

A reason I highly recommend this for players is that you always want to master your own body weight before you take on exercises that require a lot of weight. This is not only safer but also a better way for your body to get used to the stresses weight lifting can cause.

What Players Should Not Do The Pushup

While I believe doing a pushup is never the worst thing in the world I also believe players who are more advanced in their lifting career and trying to put on as much pure strength as possible should probably avoid the pushup unless they want to put it a lot of weight on there back. But in that case, a bench press would probably be much easier.

However, there still are many different variables and things you can do to make the push-up harder and more effective if you are more advanced.

How To Do The Pushup?

To do a pushup your first need to have your body parallel to the ground with your feet and arms holding you up. You then need to bend your arms and have your nose almost touch the floor.

There are many ways to do the push-up with some variations targeting certain muscles and attributes.

For more variations and ways of doing a layup check out the video below

How Many Pushups Should A Basketball Player Do?

Since I mostly believe pushups are designed for hypertrophy, I would say to keep your sets to about 3-6 but since pushup intensity has a lot to do with your fitness level repetitions are going to vary a lot from player to player. But a general rule is to stop 1-2 reps before you know you can do your last pushup. So this can be 8 for one person and 50 for the next person.

But what can be great about the pushup is you can do it throughout the day and there can even be some great benefits to this. For more information check out the video below.

Conclusion

As you can see the pushup overall can be a very useful and great upper body exercise for basketball players. Just make sure you tailor this particular exercise for what you need and are trying to do.

Thank you for reading and as always keep hooping my friends.