press up

The Press Up, also known as a "Push-Up," is a fundamental exercise that many are familiar with. It is a powerful and convenient chest builder, since you can perform this exercise almost anywhere.

Here we'll cover the basics of the Press Up, the muscles it targets, the correct execution, benefits, common errors to avoid, how to incorporate it into your workouts and provide you with other chest exercises that you can work around this exercise.

Muscles Worked When Performing the Press Up

Press Ups are a compound exercise, so they engage several major muscle groups at once, including:

Pectoralis Major (Chest): The Press Up primarily targets the chest muscles, helping you to build strength, power and definition.

Triceps Brachii (Triceps): Your triceps are targeted from a secondary perspective with this exercise. You can place more or less emphasis on the triceps by switching your hand position. By positioning your hands closer together, you place additional emphasis on the triceps, the wider the hand position, the less tricep engagement.

Anterior Deltoids (Shoulders): The front shoulder muscles are also actively engaged throughout this exercise.

Serratus Anterior: This small muscle group that sits on the side of your ribcage, under your arm, is also engaged. This muscle group supports shoulder stability and rotation.

Abs: The Press Up position, by default, engages the abs, this muscle group is engaged throughout to help you maintain a straight line position with your body. As a side note, if you want to build your strength up to do a full Press Up, simply adopting and holding the plank Press Up position, will help condition your body to perform this exercise.

You can use the muscle highlighted image at the top of this page for a visual guide of the muscles worked.

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How to Perform a Press Up

1. Set Up: To perform a Press Up, you'll need a floor.

2. Body Alignment: Assume the usual Press-Up position with your hands shoulder-width apart on the floor, and your feet around hip width apart. Maintain a straight line from your head to your heels. Engage your core muscles for stability.

3. Lowering Phase: Slowly lower your chest toward the floor, bending your elbows as you lower your chest. Keep your body in a straight line and aim to bring your chest as close to the ground as possible without compromising your form.

4. Pushing Up Phase: Pause at the bottom very briefly and then push your body back up to the start position by fully extending your arms.

5. Go For Reps: Perform multiple reps to complete your set. Focus on clean, smooth and controlled movements throughout.

Benefits of the Press Up

Chest Development: The Press Up specifically targets the upper chest and shoulders, contributing to stronger and more sculpted muscles in this area.

Convenience: You don’t need anything more than a floor to perform this exercise, so you can literally do it anywhere. Except in out of space.

Variety: Doing the same exercises over and over is not only boring, it can lead to plateaus. By introducing this common exercise you are adding the variety that your Chest Workout needs to help break plateaus and stimulate muscle growth.

Functional Strength: The strength that you will build by doing this exercise regularly will help you to develop functional strength that is beneficial in your everyday life.

Breast Enhancement: All exercises that target the pectoral muscles have the potential to boost your boobs. While you can’t change breast tissue, you have full control over how you build the muscle behind the breast tissue, this in turn will push your breasts out and up.

Press Up: Common Mistakes to Avoid

Sagging in the Middle: Maintain a straight body line throughout and don’t allow your hips or midsection to sag at all. This will ensure that you are effectively engaging your upper chest as intended.

Alignment: Besides sagging in the middle, the other common mistake we see people make is not keeping a straight line with their body, avoid sticking your bum up into the air while you perform this exercise.

Incomplete Range of Motion: You should come down until your chest is as close to the floor as you can get before you push off to come back up. If you can't lower yourself all the way down to begin with, perform the exercise on your knees so that you can complete the full range of motion and build up your strength to perform this exercise with fully extended legs.

Mind-Muscle Connection: Always focus on the upper pectoral and shoulder muscles during the exercise. A strong mind-muscle connection really does help you to achieve the best results.

Quality Reps: As mentioned above, if you can’t perform quality reps, make the exercise easier by going on your knees, good form and controlled movements are far more important. Even if you can only manage 5 clean reps, do that. Quality trumps quantity.

Reps and Sets

The number of reps and sets you perform depends on your current strength with this exercise.

Beginners: Start with simply mastering the move. Keep in mind that if you’re just starting out, 3 reps is a valid set.

To determine how many reps/sets of Press Ups you should start with, you first need to figure out how many reps you can comfortably perform. Then add 2, and perform that number of reps for 3 sets.

For example; let’s say you can perform 4 reps comfortably. Add 2 to make 6 reps. Perform those 6 reps 3 times over, allowing yourself sufficient rest inbetween.

Experienced lifters: You know your body and its abilities better than anyone, use your own judgment.

We recommend that you avoid performing more than 12 reps per set. If you’re comfortably performing 12 reps for up to 6 sets, it’s time to make the exercise more challenging.

How to Make the Press Up More Challenging

To make this exercise more challenging, you can switch up your foot position. For example; you can raise your feet up onto a step, this will shift the weight, driving through a much higher part of the chest and shoulders.

You can also shift weight distribution by playing around with your hand position, bringing your hands closer together and elbows in will place more emphasis on the triceps. A wider hand position will drive more through the chest.

You can also increase the load by adding a weight plate on your back, or slow the movement right down so that you increase your time under tension. If you prefer, to begin with, you can slow down half the move, so go down slow and come up at normal tempo, or vice versa.

If you are struggling with this exercise, you can make it easier by going on your knees, or pressing up on a bench with your feet on the floor. This higher upper body position will make the exercise easier.

How to Incorporate the Press Up into Your Workouts

The Press Up belongs in your Chest Workout or any standard Upper Body Workout Plan. You can perform this exercise on its own, or you can pair it with another chest exercise for supersets, for example; you can Bench Press 10 reps and then Press Up 10 reps as one complete set. Combining exercises is a really great way to build more muscle in less time.

Because this is a bodyweight exercise, we recommend performing it either was part of your warm up or finisher. Always start with the exercise that expends the most energy and uses the most weight, work your way down through barbell exercises, dumbbell exercises, cable/machine exercises and finish up with bodyweight exercises. You can learn more about the importance of exercise order here.

Exercises That Work Similar Muscles to the Press Up

When it comes to compound exercises, the best ones to complement the Press Up are the Bench Press, Decline Bench Press, Incline Bench Press, Wide Grip Bench Press, Close Grip Bench Press or Parallel Bar Dips.

You can also pair this exercise with other exercises, such as the Dumbbell Chest Press, Dumbbell Pullovers or the Pec Deck Chest Fly. If you’re looking for more chest isolation exercises, you can try the Seated Chest Press Machine. A combination of compound and isolation exercises is always recommended for well rounded results.

You can find more Chest Exercises at the bottom of this page. Or you can check out our entire exercise database broken down by muscle group here.

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Our exercise database is here to teach you the fundamentals of some key exercises in weightlifting. It is by no means an exhaustive list of exercises and each category is certainly not a workout plan in itself. In order to turn these exercises into a workout plan, you need to know how to combine the right exercises to achieve the best possible results.

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