The Benefits of Push-Ups
This Old School Exercise Is About a Lot More Than Developing a Stronger Chest
Push-ups are at a weird place in the fitness world. Pretty much everyone agrees that they’re a great exercise, badass even, but most casual gym goers and even athletes seem to have replaced the conventional push-up with the bench press. After all, they work the same muscles, right? And it’s easier to progress with a barbell and plates, right?
Wrong, actually! The bench press isn’t just a better version of the push-up, and push-ups are far from obsolete. In fact, we’re going to make the case that they’re essential, an exercise you can’t afford to exclude from your workout routine, and we maintain that that’s true even if you don’t prioritize strength or muscle gain in your fitness goals.
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Skeptical? We don’t blame you. There’s a mountain of propaganda extolling the virtues of the bench press, plus who doesn’t love measuring their strength progress in added weight plates? But we’re not here to trash the bench press; we’re only here to explain the benefits of push-ups, and convince you to start doing more of them, more often.
The Key Benefits of Push-Ups
Obviously, you can expect to gain size and strength from doing more push-ups, but those are far from the only benefits of incorporating this famous bodyweight exercise into your routine. Here are a few of the unsung benefits of regular push-ups:
#1. You Don’t Need a Gym
You know what keeps so many people from getting in shape? They don’t have access to a gym. Or they do have a gym membership, but they can’t always find the time or the motivation to get there. But you can skip the gym without skipping your workout, especially if you build a short routine around bodyweight exercises like, you guessed it, the humble push-up.
Some guys like to get out of bed and crank out sets of push-ups, right before their morning shower. Others prefer to set aside some time during their lunch break or find a spare 15 minutes in the afternoon to complete their sets. You can challenge yourself to do as many as you can in a single set, or pick a number to do sets of three or five and see if you can beat that in your next session; or you can just pick an arbitrary total number of daily push-ups, splitting them up into however many sets it takes to complete them all. Ultimately, what matters is that you did the work.
2. Push-Ups Involve Your Core
Unlike in a bench press, which has your entire core supported by the length and cushion of a weight bench, a push-up forces you to keep your own core tight and engaged throughout the duration of the exercise. In fact, it’s not unlike another core exercise that people neglect: the plank.
This is a significant difference, and not merely because you get more bang for your back with one exercise. For athletes, in particular, training your muscle groups to work in tandem has much greater real-world carryover than training in isolation, which makes push-ups a great way to train for everything from combat sports (throwing a punch) and football (lead blocking) to tennis (ground strokes) and golf (generating power in your swing).
3. There Are Many Push-Up Variations
Push-ups are actually very easy to progress in, mostly because there are so many variants worth exploring. If you’re just starting out, for example, and can’t crank out a single standard push-up with good form, assume the usual push-up position but with your knees on the ground; doing so will reduce the resistance significantly, giving you an easy entry into the push-up form.
As you get more advanced, you can play with hand position to change both the difficulty level and the focus of muscle tension. For example, you can widen your hand position to put more emphasis on your chest and shoulders, or narrow your hand position to put greater emphasis on your triceps. You can also raise your back legs, to make things even more challenging, or put on a weighted vest or add a plate to your back to significantly increase the resistance during standard push-ups.
4. Push-Ups Are a Great Conditioning Tool
One variable especially worth playing around with when it comes to push-ups is tempo — just think of all those military scenes in movies and TV shows where a drill sergeant has a group of grunts drop to the ground and go “down” and “up” on his say-so. Not only will doing so increase your total time under tension, and thereby maximize the hypertrophic response of your muscles; it will also stress your heart and lungs, helping transform this classic strength training exercise into an excellent conditioning exercise.
Because high reps with the bench press are inherently more dangerous/risk-prone than with push-ups (because it’s harder to bail out with the barbell on top of you, even with a spotter), push-ups are the exercise of choice when it comes to higher volume. But don’t worry: this doesn’t mean you have to ditch your beloved bench press. Instead, consider pairing them together within the same workout, using the bench for its strength in higher weights and lower reps and push-ups for volume. This can be done either with a superset, alternating between the two exercises, or by using the push-ups as a “finishing move” on your chest days. Either way, expect to be very sore the following day.
5. Push-Ups Are Great for Joint Health & Stability
In the modern world, where people spend upwards of eight hours a day sitting at a desk with hands outstretched over a keyboard, our postures tend to be terrible. Think slumped shoulders, a neck that’s two or three inches out of line with the spinal column, and a permanent hunch in the upper back that not only prevents you from standing to your full height but also inevitably leads to tightness and back pain down the line.
Thankfully, push-ups are a massively effective intervention. First, there’s shoulder stability. Unlike with the bench press, which keeps your back in a fixed position, push-ups actually engage your shoulder joint and scapula, forcing you to strengthen both under load. If you spend a lot of time at a keyboard, the plank and push-up are thefix to rounded and/or internally rotated shoulders. But the benefits don’t stop at one joint! Because push-ups also require you to support your weight through your torso, they also engage your hip flexors as stabilizers, which helps counteract the effects of prolonged sitting, restoring joint mobility to an area notorious for causing lower back pain.
In short, not only are there no downsides to continuing to incorporate pull-ups into your fitness routine, there are a lot of ancillary benefits that you’ll miss out on if you’re merely pressing a dumbbell or a barbell off a weight bench.
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