I believe many people have this same question. The push-up is a staple of any body weight exercise program. But the question is how much weight are you really pushing up when you do a push-up. In other words how can I compare it to what I might do in a weight room.

I am not sure of the source of the information that I am going to pass on to you but to the best of my knowledge it is accurate. If you are doing a standard push-up then a male will be pushing up about 75% of his weight. A woman on the other hand pushes up about 70% of her weight. Men push up more weight as a percentage of their body weight merely because they are normally bulkier through their upper bodies. They have larger chests, larger shoulders and unfortunately larger bellies in many cases. Since more of their body weight resides in their upper bodies their percentage will be slightly higher.

I weigh between 180 and 185 pounds. This means that while doing a push-up I should be pushing about 125 – 130 pounds. Now I can knock out about 50 push-ups without much problem. I have never tried bench pressing 125 pounds for 50 reps, however. I guess I will have to perform an experiment one day to see how accurate it is.

If you are performing cheat push-ups from your knees then both males and females are pushing up about 55% of their body weight. Simple math can tell you how much your are pushing.

I did not find a percentage for doing elevated push-ups but I would guess that it exceeds 80% of your body weight. It also most likely depends on how high the object is that you rest your feet on.

So their you have it. A quick simple way to determine how much weight you are lifting when doing a push-up. This can be especially helpful if you are doing an Escalating Density type program where you are trying to measure how much force you put out during a particular time period. So get out there and crank out some push-ups.

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