Research: How "Heavy" Are Push-ups? A Physiotherapist's Data-Backed Guide
As someone who enjoys doing pushups, I've always wondered what percentage of a person's body weight is being "pushed-up".
As a Physiotherapist, I often use push-ups and their variations to build and re-build strong and stable shoulders and surrounding tissue. Conceptually, I understand how to progress and regress a push-up, but I've never known the true numbers.
That is, until I recently came across this study, which looked at quantifying the ground reaction force associated with different push-up positions.
Let's take a quick look at the findings and what they mean for your strength training and rehabilitation programs.
Key Finding
A standard push-up requires lifting approximately 65% of your body weight, not your full weight, as many people assume.
Study Design
The research involved:
- 23 participants (14 men and 9 women)
- All recreationally fit individuals
- Use of force plates to record ground reaction forces (GRF)
Each participant performed six different push-up variations with standardized hand placements and push-up cadence:
- Regular push-up
- Kneeling push-up
- Incline push-up 30cm
- Incline push-up 60cm
- Decline push-up 30cm
- Decline push-up 60cm
How "Heavy" Are Push-Ups? The Body Weight Percentages
As you can see via the infographic summary above, the numbers follow a very logical progression. The more upright we are, the smaller percentage of our body weight we use. It's worth noting that these results were not affected by gender or height differences.
Incline push-ups at 60cm and 30cm only account for approximately 40% and 55% of a person's body weight respectively.
Interestingly, a kneeling push-up is similar to pushing 50% of a person's body weight, which is helpful to know, considering it's often the most used push-up variation for beginners or novices.
For me, I find it interesting that a regular push-up equates to 65% of a person's body weight. As an 80kg (176lb) man, this means I'm "pushing up" approximately 52kg (114.4lb) with each repetition.
Conversely, the closer we progress to an upside-down position, the closer we get to 100% body weight. Decline push-ups at 30cm and 60cm are similar to 70% and 75% body weight respectively.
It's probably also worth noting that a complete, free-standing handstand push-up might be the closest thing we can get to 100% body weight (allowing for hand and forearm weight), but the demands here are obviously shifted to different areas than the variations listed above.
Practical Applications for Training and Rehabilitation
Understanding these percentages can significantly impact how you approach strength training and rehabilitation:
- Progressive Overload: Use the different variations to gradually increase the load on your muscles as you get stronger.
- Rehabilitation Progression: Start with incline push-ups (lower percentage of body weight) and gradually progress to standard and eventually decline push-ups.
- Training Variety: Incorporate different push-up variations to target muscles from different angles and prevent plateaus.
- Accessible Strength Training: For those who can't perform standard push-ups yet, incline and kneeling variations provide accessible alternatives.
Limitations of the Study
As with every piece of research, it's important to consider its limitations before generalising to a wider population. If we don't, we may compromise our ability to generalise any findings to the wider population.
The following are things to consider:
- A relatively small study of 23 participants
- Participants were recreationally fit, meaning it might harder to generalize to 'unfit' or 'highly' fit populations.
More research would be great to see across larger population numbers and broader fitness spectrums and genres, but it does present a strong case to consider nonetheless.
Related: Here's why I'm at odds with evidence-based practice.
Conclusion
Push-ups are a great exercise for all fitness levels and capacities. As a Physiotherapist, I also find them to be a highly valuable and scalable rehabilitation tool for my patients.
Quantifying body weight percentages of each push-variation can help us better tailor and progress our programs to more efficiently reach our fitness and rehab goals.
Whether you're using push-ups for strength training, general fitness, or rehabilitation, understanding the actual load you're working with can help you make more informed decisions about your exercise programming.
Article Reference
Ebben, W. P., Wurm, B., VanderZanden, T. L., Spadavecchia, M. L., Durocher, J. J., Bickham, C. T., & Petushek, E. J. (2011). Kinetic Analysis of Several Variations of Push-Ups. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(10), 2891–2894. https://doi.org/10.1519/jsc.0b013e31820c8587
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