The pike push-up is a key exercise to strengthen your shoulders in preparation for the handstand push-up. Practicing the pike push-ups correctly and with perfect form will allow you to emulate the correct technique required to execute handstand push-ups efficiently.

The pike push-up serves as the fundamental building block that is required to master prior to beginning your handstand push-up journey, so let’s dive straight into how you can immediately begin to execute this movement correctly.

The key factor that we must focus on during our pike push ups is the pike position, so that our shoulders can be emphasized during the movement and so that we can imitate the correct handstand push up form.

In order to engage in the correct position and form, we must think of caving our chest inwards, sucking our abs in and pushing tall with our shoulders at the same time. The pike position alone is a great exercise for beginners to build shoulder strength and understand the proper positioning, and can be a great combination set when followed by deep hollow push ups as seen below.

In order to get a deeper understanding of the Pike Push-up, let’s break the movement down into 3 phases.

The first phase is the starting position, as explained above. For the starting position it is vital that we maintain a strong piked position with our chest caved inwards and our scapula in elevation. Keep the legs straight and the toes pointed, as close as possible to your palms.

The second phase will be the leaning phase. This is important in order to load our shoulders effectively before coming down into the pike push-up. The goal is to maintain the starting position and make a small leaning motion forward, up to where your shoulders are slightly in front of your palms.

The third phase is the eccentric portion of the movement. While maintaining the form as instructed previously, aim to come down to where your elbows form a 90 degree angle with your shoulders and wrists and then push back up to the starting position.