Have you seen the recent ‘Bring Sally Up’ challenge about doing pushups in time with the Moby track ‘Flower’? Pushups are the ultimate triceps exercise. I find it almost impossible, but I’m working on it! The lyrics are really ‘Green Sally Up’, not ‘Bring Sally Up’, but that’s a whole other story with its roots in slavery. I’ll let you Google it!
We use the triceps muscle to push things: helping ourselves out of a chair, pushing a door, and doing pushups. ‘Tri’, means ‘three’. The triceps has three components: the medial, the lateral and the long head. These all come together to attach onto the olecranon of the elbow.
The triceps is the muscle that is most commonly affected by a trapped nerve in the neck, the seventh cervical nerve. A problem with this nerve can give pain in the neck and arm, and weakness of the triceps. We normally test triceps strength, comparing one side to the other. As the nerve recovers, the triceps strength improves.
Pushups are a great way to develop our core stability, working multiple muscles, as well as to support our cardiovascular fitness. They help to strengthen our shoulders. They don’t require any equipment. They are free, and it doesn’t take very long to do them.
But, they are difficult. In another video I’ll show you how you can start to do pushups at a level that suits you and how to gradually progress so that you can do push-ups at a level that helps to get you fitter and stronger!
If you feel strong enough to have a go at the challenge here is a link to a YouTube video of the track with a timer so that you can see how long you can keep going. Push yourself up and stay up with \’Green Sally Up\’ and then lower yourself down and stay down with the lyric \’Bring Sally Down\’. See how long you can keep going!
Green Sally up and green Sally down
Lift and squat, gotta tear the ground
Old Miss Lucy’s dead and gone
Left me here to weep and moan….