BACKED BY SCIENCE
How Much Body Weight Do You Push-Up?
Play with push-up variations to optimize your gains!
Push-ups are often recommended as one of the best upper body exercises to enhance fitness. Great move because it doesn’t require any equipment and can be done everywhere.
I am sure you have heard of many push-up exercises but do you know how much of your weight you are actually pushing?
At the gym, it is easy to determine resistance training’s intensity; it allows progression. Using the calculation of training volume allow setting clear strength objectives.
Here’s how you can do the same with push-ups training and allow the best progression!
Push-ups
Push-ups are a commonly performed, multijoint upper body exercise that does not require equipment.
Push-ups are so good that they are used as an upper body strength test and are often included on standardized fitness tests, including those used for military recruits.
The push up is one of the best-known exercises. There are many variations of the push-up, and these variations can differ substantially in their difficulty. It allows beginners to use a more accessible variation to start and then progress to more difficult variations as they improve.
How much of your body mass do you push up?
This study quantified the training load of different push-up variation: hands elevated (30 or 60 cm box), feet elevated (30 or 60 cm box), knees on the ground and the regular push-up. Subjects performed push-ups on a force platform to assess ground reaction forces, and these were then expressed as a percentage of bodyweight. The people involved were recreationally fit young adult men and females.
The 60 cm hands elevated variation was the easiest push-up and equalled 41% of body weight. A regular push up equalled 64% of body weight (BW), and the most challenging version tested was when the feet were elevated the most (74% BW).
Therefore, by elevating your hands or feet, you can adjust the difficulty of the exercise as desired. Increasing the height of your feet relative to that of your hands will increase the load.
Adapt your training to your objectives
Now that you know the easiest and hardest variation of push-up, you can train according to your level. You might only exercise from home now with the COVID restrictions but still want some muscle growth or strength gains; you can include the most adapted variation to your routine.
Start with push-ups with hand elevated at 60cm or higher for the most accessible version; once you master them, go for the flexed knee version, and so on.
You can even calculate the training volume, the total load you lifted on a session. It is an excellent indicator of performance and progression.
Try to increase the training volume compared to the previous session every time for optimal results.
Tips:
You can quickly know exactly how much you lift when doing a push-up; you would only need a scale.
You only need to perform a slow push-up with your hands on a scale and read the weight displayed on the screen. That would give you a rough estimation of how hard you are training on one repetition.
Final thoughts
In conclusion, the training load of a regular push up equals ~65% of your BW. You can manipulate and adapt the charge by elevating the hands (to make it easier) or the feet (to make it more difficult).
Make your own program according to your level in callisthenics and be stronger after every session.
To make it even harder than the feet elevated on a box of 60cm, you can do it on a single arm or go higher until a handstand push up against the wall. Another option would be to use some extra weight to make weighted push-ups.
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