Push-Ups

Lyadeia

I got this email from Jim Stoppani, PhD and I thought that I would share it with you since it talks about how much weight you are actually pushing while doing push-ups, among other things. I thought that it was interesting, especially for numbers people.

"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 a great market 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."

So I guess until I lose a little more weight, I can think of push-ups as pressing away 97 pounds for however many reps I do, lol. Of course this weight goes down over time, but then again, reps go up.

melelana

Awesome article! I will surely do more push ups now

beautifulnovember

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing! I need to work on actually doing a full push up now.

jmvh59

That's really interesting. I wonder how other body-weight driven exercises stack up, like dips. I now understand why doing pushups is so dang hard for me... : ) Thanks for the info.

bloodguilt

Thank you for sharing. The article seems incomplete to me though. Anyhow, I use push ups [3 variations] as my warm up and cool down sets on my pecs days. I want to clarify about the decline/incline push ups variations mentioned here. I believe that you hit the upper pecs when you do incline push ups [feet on bench and hands on floor] and lower pecs when you do push ups with feet on the ground while hands is elevated. Thanks!

fragilegift

I do my push ups using the freezer as a base (feet about 1m away) - keeps the uh...girls out of the way.

hazelnutflav

thanks for sharing, now i know why i hurt so much the day after i do them

skylark94

I do my push ups 3 days a week. I''m working through the 100 push ups program doing the "girlie" from the knee type, then will start over on my toes. I hope to be able to do 35 proper ones by July 2012.