Add bars to your toolkit for more comfortable push-ups and better mind-body connection.
Do More With is a series highlighting equipment around the Club that can help you reach your fitness goals. In this installment, we highlight push-up bars, available on the Club floor.
It’s not easy stepping out of your comfort zone, especially at your Equinox Club. So it makes sense that, nearly every time you step foot on the weight floor, you use the same pieces of equipment — maybe it’s the BOSU, landmine, or medicine ball.
But it’s worth breaking from those confines and challenging yourself with something completely new — like the push-up bars, also known as dip or parallette bars. As a Coach+ and manager at Equinox Miracle Mile, I often see the same, select group of people training with the tool. And it’s about time other members take advantage of it.
Here’s why.
Why Train with Push-Up Bars
Unsurprisingly, these bars are particularly useful when performing push-ups. Doing the exercise, either on the knees or toes, with your hands flat on the floor can put a lot of stress on the wrists, which can cause aches and pains. When you wrap your hands around the bars instead, the pressure on the joints shifts and tends to feel more comfortable. Plus, gripping onto the bar activates more muscles throughout your arms. With more working muscles comes more stability, lending to a stronger push-up.
That’s just the beginning of the benefits for your push-ups. Elevating yourself off the floor by holding onto the bars also allows for a greater range of motion; you’re able to lower yourself further than if your hands were placed flat on the ground. Your chest can drop below the height of your hands, so you’ll have a greater stretch in the chest muscles.There are more muscle groups that are getting to work with the bars, as opposed to when you do a push-up on the floor or even a barbell bench press. One word of caution: You’ll have a greater internal rotation in the shoulders if you don’t engage your back muscles. To avoid this, squeeze your shoulder blades together as you lower yourself and keep your elbows about six inches from your torso.
But push-up bars aren’t just for, well, push-ups. You can also use the tool to try out calisthenic exercises, like L sits, handstands, and frog stands. Practicing these controlled movements over and over again builds up your mind-body connection so that, over time, you’re able to tap into those working muscles more efficiently and effectively.
That's ultimately what we want for every member, from the general fitness level to the pro athletes. We want everyone to be able to do movements correctly, contracting the right muscle groups. Instilling that connection not only allows you to fully stimulate the activated muscles — leading to a better reaction from exercise and outcomes like hypertrophy — but it also enables you to move your body well, supporting long-term health and everyday functioning.
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How to Use Push-Up Bars
Aside from the classic push-up, you can use the bars in place of dumbbells to master new movement patterns without too much load. Consider a renegade row. Do a push-up on the bars, then while holding a high plank, row one of the bars up toward your ribcage while trying to keep your hips and shoulders stable. Set the bar down, do a push-up, and then repeat the row on the other side. This three-in-one exercise not only trains your chest (from the push-up) and your back (from the rows), but it’s also ideal for building core strength and stability — a prerequisite to calisthenic exercises. You can even do a row to an overhead press, rotating through the spine to press one bar up toward the ceiling above your shoulder, while in that plank position.
Don’t forget to tap into the extra range of motion that bars offer elsewhere in your routine, too. Use them for triceps dips — with two bars positioned at your sides and your legs extended on the floor or elevated on risers — bending through the elbows to lower yourself up and down.
I also love using parallette bars for fun movements — moves that add an element of play into my routine. I tend to string a few together into a challenging flow. I might start in an L sit (holding myself above the push-up bar, with my body forming an “L”), send my feet back to land in a high plank, do a push-up, and then, slowly and with control, kick my feet forward and settle back to that L sit. You could also swap the L sit with a reverse plank, which is a bit less challenging; your feet are resting on the floor, your hips and shoulders are elevated, your chest is pointed up to the ceiling, and your body forms a straight line from shoulders to hips and hips to ankles.
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No matter how you’re using the bars, one of the end goals is always learning how to control your body. That means you should prioritize quality over quantity. Spend a breath or two holding yourself in each position, lowering yourself (in a push-up, a dip, etc.) for three to four seconds, and returning back to your starting position with the same slow tempo.
You might feel work happening if you’re moving faster than that. But your muscles are crazy adaptive; they act like rubber bands and store elastic energy that allows you to “bounce” back and forth, so to speak. That means when you’re working at lightning speed, you’re able to perform more reps. But you’re essentially doing less work — it reduces how much stimulus you get. The key to real, long-term benefits with the push-up bars? Take a slowed, controlled approach. Without it, you're just moving to move.
Josh Espinoza is a COACH+, PT educator, and MNR manager at Equinox Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. He has been at Equinox for more than eight years and has a master’s degree in exercise sciences and human performance, as well as business administration. He holds certifications from Precision Nutrition and StrongFirst and in ViPR and pre-/post-natal training, among others.