Aleks “The Hebrew Hammer” Salkin’s Free Report:

How to Learn the 1-Arm Pushup in 15 Minutes or Less. You’re going to learn how to do a 1-Arm push from my free report. And, if you’re a person who already has good upper body strength, you’ll be able to learn my techniques and accomplish the 1-arm pushup in 15 minutes or less. And…at the end of my report, I’ve included a FREE SURPRISE BONUS! WAIT! Don’t look at it now – stay with me…imagine how you’ll feel when you can do a 1-arm pushup. Alright – let’s get started. We’ll go back in history to a time when strength training was raw and real. So raw you needed no support gear or fancy spandex clothing to train. So real, your strength was easily applicable to the harsh realities of the outside world, not just to the sissified, mirror-laden gyms most people mistakenly call home. Let’s go back to the time before the bench press was the apple of every 98 pound weakling gym rat’s eye – before “NO CURLING IN THE SQUAT RACK!” became the battle cry of a beleaguered generation of true strength enthusiasts. Let’s go back even further. Let’s go back to the first months of your birth. One of the first boxes you checked off on your baby “To Do” list was to get stronger. Yeah, mewling and puking was up there too, but in order to move from the spot in the middle of the floor to your shiny toys on the other side of the room, you had to be strong enough to move your own body from point A to point B. From rolling to rocking to crawling to walking, moving your own body in free space is checkmark number one on everyone’s “to do” list of essential growth and development. And in my correct opinion, it’s a shame how few people continue to hone this most fundamental and essential of skills, falling instead for high-rep pumps that make them pretty but not powerful. Moving your body in free space is a prerequisite to moving other objects in free space. You were not bench pressing your blocks to build up your strength to push yourself off the ground – you started by using what you were born with to go from barely being able to move your fat little noggin all the way to balancing on your legs and actually moving this previously immovable mass all over the place! Seriously, no small feat if you really think about it. From this, it should be pretty clear how essential bodyweight exercises are for building true, usable strength in the real world.

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Your ability to move your body with strength and confidence in free space is the base of your real-world strength: everything else is built on that. In my own experience as well as in the words of world-renown kettlebell and strength training expert Pavel Tsatsouline “Bodyweight strength training will teach you more about the discipline of building strength than any other form of strength training out there.” I know, I know, this sounds a little too fantastic – at least until you consider how often gymnasts (whose routines consist of only their own bodyweight) often pull two and even THREE TIMES their bodyweight upon learning how to deadlift! Strength coach Charles Poliquin has noted how multiple gymnasts he’s trained have gone from just learning the bench press to benching 350 in a matter of weeks. Gymnasts are masters at resisting the unforgiving pull of gravity on their bodies at weird and challenging leverages and angles. This ability translates quickly beyond moving their bodies in free space to moving weights in free space. If you want a deeper insight into out-of-this-world strength, you would do well to learn at least ONE feat of awe-inspiring calisthenics freak strength. What better way to get back to basics than by getting back to your base: moving from the ground up! And how can you express your strength merely by getting up off the ground? Enter the one-arm pushup. In a variety of weird ways, it is a lot like bigfoot: tons of people claim to have seen one, but every attempt at proof is an unconvincing stretch at best – namely because there’s a difference between pushing yourself upward and performing a one-arm pushup. Ya gotta have standards. Let’s take a look at a two “also-rans” that don’t quite cut it: Rocky gets an ‘A’ for effort, but with hips and chest twisted skyward and arm placed too far out to the side in order to make the exercise easier, this doesn’t qualify.

Good thing this guy is a drawing! The back is far too extended to make this a worth-while 1-armer.

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So what really qualifies as a good one-arm pushup?    

Maintaining what gymnasts call the hollow position (shoulders pushed down away from ears, chest sunken, and midsection braced) Staying rigid throughout the body – including legs, midsection, and non-working arm – throughout the exercise Keeping chest and hips level with the ground Not splaying the feet too wide.

And why? Doing all of the above requires – and builds – strength. Splaying your feet too wide, mangling your limbs all over the place and letting your hips and chest reach for the sky is at best a party trick that will only impress those who don’t know any better. You will not get any stronger from them, though you might get a phone number or two from easily impressed ladies. In that case, stop reading this report and keep on rocking. If you want to do them the legit way, the following guide will help you. Don’t skip steps no matter how easy they seem. Again, bodyweight strength training will teach you a lot about the discipline of building strength, and part of discipline is patience. If you’re strong enough to breeze through one or two steps, learn from them what you can before you move on, but don’t skip anything. Your goldfish-length attention span will do you no good in the world of strength training. Stay on task!

To start off, you’ll need a training partner (or at least someone with a strong set of mitts). 1) Test your handshake. Squeeze your partner’s hand as hard as you can (point your index finger if your grip is significantly stronger than your partner’s). Partners: note the strength of the handshake Next, get down into a plank. Not a wussy-ass two minute endurance event; a 10 second isometric war. Brace your abs hard for a punch, pinch a coin with your glutes, and squeeze your lats (armpit muscles) all while looking down between clenched fists. Breathe shallow throughout. (Tip: power breathe – hiss through your teeth – to increase the pressure in your abs to strengthen and tighten them even more). Retest Page 3 of 9

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your handshake and note the difference. 2) Wake your ass up! Seriously – it may not seem important now, but having a butt that’s wide awake and not asleep on the job will translate over to your hollow position and hence your ability to perform a one-arm pushup. To do this, lay on your back, feet flat and knees pointing to the ceiling. Lift your hips as high as you can and note how your glutes automatically tense up. Flip over, apply this feeling to your plank for 10 solid seconds, and when you’re done, test your handshake again. 3) Assume the position! Get into the pushup position, hands at shoulder width or slightly wider, and – while replicating that plank feeling – perform 3-5 pushups. (Tip: Point elbow pits forward) (Bonus tip: push shoulders away from your ears.) Digging deeper: Yielding to gravity as your body falls with style toward the floor is weak as piss. Get used to pulling yourself down by doing bodyweight rows. Not a great exercise in and of themselves, but they illustrate how to pull yourself down in your pushups rather than just controlling your fall. Do 3-5 bodyweight rows followed by 3-5 pushups; repeat. (Note: when doing your pushups, stay tight. If you’re strong as it is you don’t HAVE to stay tight to do pushups, which allows you to do many in a row. This is great for some basic conditioning training but will do less than nothing to help you build real strength. Though you don’t HAVE to stay tight, the purpose of this drill is to teach you the skill of staying tight in every nook and cranny of your body and maintaining this tightness during movement. If one of your goals is high-rep pushups, get rid of the tension and relax as much as possible. If your goal is one-arm pushups (as I assume it is) get used to getting tight and staying tight, as failure to do so will get you nowhere.) 4) Return of the plank! We are onto some next level type stuff now. You’re going to plank again, only this time you are going to spread your feet wider than shoulder width, hollow your body out (pinch a coin, brace for a punch, etc.) and get the tip of your index finger about at your midline. Hold this position on both sides. Practice this; don’t try to hold it any longer than you comfortably can without struggling.

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5) Once you’ve got step four down pat, you’re going to displace your hip toward your working arm. This is called a side hinge. If you’ve ever swung a kettlebell or deadlifted a heavy barbell, you’ll be familiar with the hip hinge. It’s the same concept, only off to the side. From there, row yourself down toward the ground. If you find you can’t row yourself to the ground without collapsing (and you’re being a good boy/girl and you’re maintaining the hollow position), improve your leverage by elevating your working arm on some sturdy object (don’t bother with stairs – in my experience they get in the way of the movement and you’re not likely to build up to a decent one-armer this way). You can also use this opportunity to do one-arm rows in the same fashion as you did before. Get used to pulling yourself down into the bottom position; you’re not Buzz Lightyear, so no falling with style! 6) Hang out in the bottom position and hold it on either side for sets of 5-10 seconds. Use this as an opportunity to get accustomed to the position your body mechanics can (somewhat) comfortably support you on the floor. Make sure you’re keeping your chest just slightly above the floor – your shirt should just brush the ground. 7) After you own the top and bottom positions, put them together! Row yourself down, and push yourself back up. Repeat on the other side. Congratulations! You’ve done your first legit one-arm pushups! If you’re anything like me, you’re going to want to go beyond just the one-arm pushup. Here are some worthy challenges for you to conquer now that you’re a powerful devotee of calisthenics training. 1) Do them for reps. Work your way up to five reps per side. To do so, perform sets throughout the day each day of the week, varying the difficulty level. For example, one day do full one-arm pushups, other days just hold the top and bottom positions, and other days do them with your hand elevated for 3-5 reps. In time you’ll build up a strong groove and will be banging out multiple one-arm pushups before you can say “Drop and give me 50!” Going beyond this is great, but unnecessary. If you can do five one-arm pushups easily on each side, you need a harder challenge. Here are a few that you’ll probably love/hate. Page 5 of 9

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2) Elevate your feet. Everything else stays the same, except for rather than aiming to touch your chest to the floor, aim to touch your forehead to the floor. Touching your chest to the floor with elevated feet is asking for back problems for many people. 3) Dead start. Rather than starting from the top and pulling yourself down, start on the floor – totally relaxed – and tense up as hard as you can and push! This will teach you to build up the full body tension required for great strength under lessthan-optimal conditions. 4) Feet-together one-arm pushups. These, I must admit, are my least favorite variation. When done right, they’re awesome, but I find them much more awkward than all the other variations. Also, because of the feet being closer together, the hips have to kick over even further and that just seems to lend itself to hips and upper body twisting skyward. Do these as you get stronger, but avoid these pitfalls and do them right. And last but not least, the KING of onearm pushups…. 5) The one-arm/one-leg pushup. Rarer than a legitimate bigfoot sighting, doing these will also give you something else very rare: raw brute strength using just your bodyweight. Where other pushups lay down the foundation, this pushup claims the shining tip of the mountain that is pushup excellence. Not only will this give you pecs and triceps of concrete, but it will likely have a very good carryover to other aspects of your strength as well. Upon achieving onearm/one-leg pushups, I was able to perform a halfbodyweight one-arm kettlebell military press – something that had long eluded me before. One-arm/one-leg pushups should be your ultimate goal, and when you arrive, you can savor the flavor, as so few will ever accomplish such a feat. Unfortunate too, considering how much it gives to you without taking from you.

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FREE SURPRISE BONUS! Few things are better than a free surprise! Well – here’s one for you, and this one’s a HUGE help to those who feel like they’re not flexible enough. All this one-arm pushup practice is going to tighten you up a lot if you don’t focus on restorative techniques such as fast and loose (shaking out your limbs like runners do) and proper stretching. Here are a few stretches to leave you feeling like a million bucks without having to drop about that much on a massage therapist to do it for you. 1. Back bridges. Stretch out your abs and strengthen your back at the same time. Win-win.

2. Hip/glute stretch. All that butt-squeezing is going to catch up to you. This is the yin to the hollow position’s yang.

3. Pec/shoulder stretch. This is great for opening you up and keeping your shoulders healthy.

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4. Tricep stretch. Keeping your triceps flexible will – believe it or not – keep your shoulders happy as well. Don’t overlook this and other triceps stretches.

5. Quad stretch. These coupled with some Hardstyle kettlebell swings will keep your leg strength balanced and your quads from locking up.

6. QL stretch. Your stabilizer muscles will get tighter and tighter the more you practice. To keep them happy (including your quadratus lumborum in your back) make sure you stretch them out.

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And there you have it! The one-arm pushup guide. For some ideas on programming, I highly recommend the proven method popularized by Pavel known as Greasing the Groove. Just practice throughout the day almost every day. Vary the intensity, some days doing hard versions (full one-arm pushups) other days doing easier versions (onearm pushups with your hand elevated; one-arm planks). Only do approximately half the amount of reps you could do if you were to go all out; the idea is to practice your strength, not “work out”. Do this for a few weeks, take a day or two off and then test yourself. You will be amazed by your progress. Power to your pushups! Aleks Salkin

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