How Much of Your Bodyweight Do You Lift in a Push-Up?

I really like push-ups.

They’re available anywhere, can be made harder or easier, and they help increase my bench press strength.

There is, however, one question that inevitably arises when you start doing them:

How much of my bodyweight am I lifting in a push-up?

The answer depends on a few factors:

How your bodyweight is distributed (Do you have more weight in your upper body, lower body, or in the middle?).
If you are on flat ground, or your hands or feet are placed on an elevation.
If you’re referring to the top or bottom position.

Kneeling push-ups — … kneeling push-up will. In both variants, you will have slightly more weight in your hands in the bottom position than the top because of how the angle of your body shifts.

Below are the results from a study where 28 trained men assumed the push-up position with their hands placed on a scale.¹ They measured their weight at both the top and bottom push-up positions, while kneeling and on their feet.

The feet and knees were elevated to the same height as the scale to avoid influencing the measurement.

How much of your bodyweight do you lift in a pushup diagram 2

The results showed that they lifted:

75% of their bodyweight in the bottom position in a regular push-up, and 69% in the top.
62% of their bodyweight in the bottom position in a kneeling push-up, and 54% in the top.

Since the bottom position is the heaviest portion of a push-up and also where your muscles are stretched into a lengthened position, this is probably the most important number to take home: and it is that you lift 75% of your bodyweight in the bottom of a regular push-up.

(At least for lean males. More on this later.)

In the classic book Science and Practice of Strength Training by Kraemer and Zatsiorsky, the following diagram appears (adapted by me because theft is bad and also my scanner isn’t working):

How much of your bodyweight do you lift in a pushup

According to this diagram, you lift 65% of your bodyweight in a regular push-up.

However, it is not clear if this number refers to …

the top or bottom position, and for
men or women.

The reason for why the sex matters is that women tend to have more of their body weight in the lower body compared to men, and will therefore lift a little less of their bodyweight in a push-up, in general.

As a rule of thumb, based on both of these sources, you can probably say that you lift around 70% of your bodyweight in a regular push-up.

This is also the default setting we use for push-ups in our workout log app.

How to Find Out Exactly How Much Weight You Lift in a Push-Up

The simplest way to see how much of your bodyweight you lift in a push-up is to use the same method as in the study mentioned earlier:

Get a scale and something of equal height (like a thick book).
Assume a push-up position with your hands on the scale and your feet on the other object.
See what the scale reads in both the top and bottom positions.

It might be a bit tricky to be able to do the readings while in the bottom position, so you might need someone to help you. You will also probably have to use a more narrow hand position than you normally do, but that won’t influence the readings.

Why Is This Useful to Know?

Maybe you want to compare it to what you can lift in the bench press.

Maybe you want to track it in our workout log.

Maybe you just like to think about these things, like I do. 🙂

As far as comparisons with the bench press goes, push-ups have actually been shown to yield good muscle growth in both the chest and triceps in resistance-trained young men.²

Eight weeks of two workouts per week, where they did three sets to failure in either push-ups or bench press with 40% of their 1RM resulted in similar muscle and strength gains for both groups.

Yes, 40% of 1RM is rather light (you can probably do 30–40 reps with that weight), but is has actually been shown to yield similar muscle growth as heavier weights.³

No matter what you think about the load used in the bench press, the results from the push-up group is still interesting: two workouts per week with three sets of push-ups, increased their chest and tricep muscle thickness by 22.4% and 10.5%, respectively, in eight weeks.

For all of us not strong enough to bust out multiple sets of 40+ deep, controlled reps, push-ups seem to offer a practical and accessible training option for both pecs and tri’s when you don’t have the time or possibility to get to the gym.

How to Make Push-Ups Easier

If regular push-ups are still a bit heavy for you, or you just want to make them slightly lighter, two ways to do so are the kneeling push-up and the incline push-up.

Both of these decrease the percentage of your bodyweight that you lift, thus making it easier.

incline push-up exercise technique — Incline Push-Up

You can even combine these two into a kneeling incline push-up, if you want to make it easier still.

Then, just gradually build from here by doing more reps, more sets, or progressing to more challenging variations. For instance, you could gradually decrease the height of the incline on which you raise your hands.

How to Make Push-Ups Harder

Are regular push-ups too easy for you?

The most classic way to make them harder is to place your feet on an elevation and perform decline push-ups.

This increases the percentage of your bodyweight that you lift, thus increasing the resistance your muscles will have to overcome.

A variation of the decline push-up is to place your feet in gymnastic rings (or similar).

This actually turns it into a really decent core exercise because of the instability, and because your abdominal muscles have to produce more force in order to keep your body straight.

And of course, for the highest level of difficulty and awesomeness of all: you can do the one-handed push-up.

…

Yeah, you’re not going to get a video demonstration of that from me or our team today.

More Reading:

How Much of Your Bodyweight Do You Lift in a Push-Up?

How to Find Out Exactly How Much Weight You Lift in a Push-Up

Why Is This Useful to Know?

How to Make Push-Ups Easier

How to Make Push-Ups Harder

References

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