You may have heard of the Perfect Pushup. If you’ve spent any time on a couch in front of the TV on lazy a Sunday morning, you’re probably well aware of the infomercial.
A perfectly muscular man holds two handles shoulder-width apart, and rotates his arms as he lowers into his first push up, muscles flexing and all. As he pushes himself back into the starting position, a soft voice-over tells the audience that the Perfect Pushup helps “maximize strength, and minimize stress on your body.”
But you may not have heard that Perfect Fitness, the company that produces the Perfect Pushup, released an updated version of the apparatus named the Perfect Pushup V2. New York Family Sports got its hands on one set of each version and put two New York athletes on loan from the Yorkville Youth Athletic Association to the test to find out which is better. Led by John McNamara, (who has trained Olympians and many NCAA Division I athletes and is a professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn with a PhD in kinesiology) fifteen-year-olds Ahrman Burke and Henry Lowe labored through a workout, alternating between each of the two kinds of Perfect Pushups.
Our experimenters agreed: the new version is better, but only by the slimmest of margins.
Ahrman, a basketball player at Xavier High School, thought the updated version was slightly more comfortable: “I like the way the new one feels,” he said, “there’s more padding on the handle.” Searching for other differences, he also complained that the older one “is a little bit looser on the turns”—which is the key to the patented arm rotations emphasized by the Perfect Pushup.
McNamara, Henry and Ahrman all agreed the Perfect Pushup better than your standard, old-fashioned, hands-flat-on-the-ground push up.
McNamara praised several aspects of the apparatus. “It doesn’t strain your shoulder because of the motion,” he said, “and you get more depth so you can lower your body even further” which allows you to work more with each push up. Henry, a basketball player and track runner at Xavier before transferring to Dalton High School this fall, certainly felt that extra work John was talking about. “The Perfect Pushups feel a lot harder, it feels like it works out more muscles than regular push ups,” he said, recommending the Perfect Pushup. “You feel it in your shoulders and your pecs.”
How perfect is that?
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The Perfect Pushup
877.974.7733
www.perfectonline.com
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