Fingertip Push-Ups: Should you do them? How to get started, and how to do them the right way

Fingertip push-ups can be a great way to strengthen your fingers

Fingertip Push-Ups Strengthen Your Hands & Forearms

Fingertip push-ups involve many of the same muscles that a regular push-up engages: chest, front shoulders, abs, and triceps.

However, because of the way you’re pushing your body up on your fingers, it also trains your hand and forearm muscles more intensely than regular push-ups. The Navy SEAL Fitness Guide includes instructions on fingertip push-ups:

Fingertip Push-Ups Are Good For Your Wrists

When you do regular push-ups, your wrists are in a flexed angle, which puts a lot of strain on your wrist joints. If you’re experiencing discomfort or even pain in your wrists when doing push-ups, fingertip push-ups can be a great addition to your workout routine. The wrists won’t be flexed as much as they are with a regular push-up where your hands are flat on the floor, and thus there’s less strain on the wrist.

How To Get Started With Fingertip Push-Ups

If you’ve never done fingertip push-ups, don’t go overboard on your first try. You want to progressively build up strength.

Avoid injury when starting with fingertip push-ups

A good way to get started with fingertip push-ups is to simply do a plank on your fingertips, and just hold that for 15 seconds. Then gradually build up strength by holding it for 30 seconds on another day, 45 seconds on another day, 1 minute on yet another day. (If you notice strain or discomfort in your finger joints or tendons, work in a rest & recovery day until the pain and discomfort is gone.)

Once you can do the 1 minute plank on your fingertips without strain or discomfort, do a couple of push-ups, and do the same thing: gradually, over time, build up strength by increasing the number of push-ups you do on your fingertips.

Here’s a good video on that subject:

Another way to build up strength for fingertip push-ups, as an alternative to planks, is to do fingertip wall-pushes.

So simply stand an arm-length away from a wall, feet shoulder-width apart. Place your fingertips against the wall and then do “push-ups” against the wall. This way, you’ll simulate fingertip push-ups, but with a much lighter weight.

Like with so many things when building strength and working out, it’s better to err on the side of caution than to err on the side of going too hard on your body. That’s what I find true for me, after an experience of injuring my shoulders when working out too hard, and then being unable to do my workouts for weeks and months, undoing a lot of the progress I had made until then.

Finally, here’s some inspiration for your fingertip push-ups from the grandmaster himself, Bruce Lee (with some inappropriately sentimental background music added by whoever edited this video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rdGqKNsRFs

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