LAST time I talked about muscular strength and endurance.

Strength is the ability of the muscles to repeatedly perform an action under load. Endurance is the ability to sustain a position under load.

A measure of your strength could be, for instance, how many times you could pick up a can of beans before you fatigue.

Easy? How many times could you pick up the crate of beans?

To improve the strength of your muscles you would aim to progress from just being able to pick up one can a dozen times before you conked out to being able to shift the whole crate a dozen times.

In a nutshell, this is the theory of progressive strength training, although of course our body is more complex than that. But you don’t need a warehouse full of beans to improve your strength, or even a gym full of equipment.

You can use your own body weight to build muscular strength.

Think of the good old pushup.

In general, the push up strengthens the chest and shoulder area. But if you apply a little science to the position you can be working a lot more than that.

You can do a push-up standing up facing a wall, good for beginners, pregnancy, and people with shoulder and neck problems.

The further away your feet are from the wall, the greater the load on your chest and shoulder muscles. Or on all fours on the floor, or in plank position.

I teach Pilates push up a lot in my pilates studio, it’s a tough exercise and our body just wants to cheat it’s way through.

Have your hands directly under the shoulder joints. If your shoulders are up around your ears you will just give yourself a neck ache, so, shoulders down and wide all the way through.

Can’t keep your shoulders down? Choose an easier position and do fewer, it’s not worth the pain in the neck. How’s the position of your spine? No humping or dipping the back whichever style of push up you go for.

Keep your spine held in constant alignment all the way through the exercise, no rock and roll!

Lift up your buttock muscles if you do the full push-up…that helps to stop the back from sagging. Pull in lightly around the sit bones. Remember to switch on your deepest abdominal muscles. I mean your pelvic floor and yes, men have one too!

The pelvic floor keeps all your organs in place and provides support to the base of the pelvis. The pelvic floor muscles will co-contract with the deepest abdominals. You don’t have to tense up all of your stomach area, that’s old hat and not in line with the latest research.

For men and women alike, switching on the pelvic-floor muscles feels like lifting your sex organs up inside you. You need to keep that muscle switched on for the duration of the exercise. And that’s what I mean by endurance!

Patricia Issitt is a movement therapist and Pilates instuctor and has worked in fitness and wellbeing since 1990. Patricia opened York Pilates Space, a fully equipped Pilates studio in the city centre in 2004