Push-Up Points

Push-ups can and should be a mainstay in your upper body training. Here's how to implement them correctly.

Written By Jim Stoppani, PhD

Updated March 17, 2020

Push-ups are hands down a great exercise (pun intended!).

In fact, they are one of the first exercises I did regularly as a very young kid. And I'm talking 6 or 7 years old. And regardless of how much muscle I gained or how high-tech my workouts became, I always kept push-ups in the mix.

Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to give up on push-ups as they get more involved with weight training.

For some reason they feel that push-ups are an inferior exercise compared to the bench press or other exercises you can do for chest.

But push-ups remain a great exercise regardless of how much you can bench press or how big your chest gets.

Standard push-ups are great for upper body muscle endurance. Plus, they not only work the pecs, delts and triceps, but they are actually a great exercise for the core. And you can do push-ups anywhere with no equipment needed. This makes them a great exercise for when you are traveling or stuck without any equipment.

One problem with push-ups is the fact that you can only quantify how many reps you can do, but you can't really quantify the true resistance or "weight" you are using.

Sure you know how much you weigh, but when you do a push-up you are not using 100% of your body weight. And what type of resistance are you using if you put your feet up on a bench to do a decline push-up? Or you put your hands up on a bench to do an incline push-up? Sure these change the amount of your body weight that you are using, but by how much?

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside set out to calculate exactly how much weight you are lifting when you do the push-up in different variations.

They had subjects perform six different versions of the push-up on a force plate to measure how much of their body weight they were supporting during the push-up. They had them do standard push-ups, two different levels of decline push-ups, two different levels of incline push-ups and knee push-ups to cover all the bases.

They reported in a 2011 issue of the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research that when they did the standard push-up they used 65% of their body weight.

So in other words a 200-pound man would be using a weight of about 130 pounds.

When the subjects placed their feet up on a one-foot high box to do a decline push-up, it increased the percent of their body weight being used to 70%.

That means that the 200-pound man would be using a weight of about 140 pounds.

When they placed their feet up on a two-foot box it increased the percent of their body weight to 75%.

So that equals about 150 pounds for the 200 pounder.

When they placed their hands up on the one-foot high box to do an incline push-up, it decreased the percent of their body weight being used to 55%.

So the 200-pounder would be using only about 110 pounds.

When they placed their hands up on the two-foot high box, it decreased their percent body weight being used to just 40%.

That's about 80 pounds for the 200-pound guy.

And when they did push-ups on their knees, they used 50% of their body weight.

That of course, is about 100 pounds for the 200 pounder.

Jim's take-home message:

The push-up is a great exercise for developing the pecs, as well as for building upper body muscle strength and endurance. Now that you can calculate how much weight you are lifting when you do push-ups, hopefully it will help you gain more respect for the push-up and use it more frequently. It can also help you calculate how much weight to add to your body weight to get closer to your bench press weight. For example, a 200 pound guy who can bench press 185 pounds for 10 reps would need to add 80 pounds of weight, such as from a weight vest, to get close to his bench press weight, to do 10 push-ups.

One great way to use push-ups is to do them at the very end of a chest workout when the pecs are fried. I like to do extended sets by starting with one set of decline push-ups, immediately followed by regular push-ups, immediately followed by incline push-ups. Repeat that three times and you will definitely appreciate push-ups more.