reckonerElevated pike push-up
The pike push-up with the feet up on something. Raising the feet pushes more of you onto your hands and stands the body up closer to vertical, so it is how a bodyweight press gets heavier without any weight existing. The surface is the load.
Feet up high, crown down to the floor.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, triceps
- Kit
- Bodyweight, sturdy surface
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Find something that will not move
A bench, a low box, a step, the edge of a bed. Knee height to start, and put your weight through it before you put your feet on it. A surface that slides out is the one thing in this movement that can genuinely hurt you.
Feet up, then walk the hands back
Get into a push-up with the feet on the surface, then step the hands back toward it until the hips are stacked over the shoulders and the back is straight. Hips over shoulders is what makes this a press rather than a decline push-up.
Lower the crown of your head to the floor
Between the hands, not in front of them, elbows traveling back and slightly out. Touch lightly or come close, and keep the hips exactly where they were. That is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist: feet up high, crown down to the floor.
Press away and finish tall
Straight arms, shoulders pushed away from the ears, hips still stacked. If the hips fall on the way up you have finished the rep as a decline push-up, and that is a different exercise with a different muscle doing it.
What goes wrong
Going too high too soon
Elevating the feet is not a small change. In a force plate comparison of push-up variations, feet elevated produced a higher peak force through the hands than every other variation measured1. Pick the height that lets you keep the line for the whole set and come up a step when the top of the rep range stops being a fight.
Letting the hips sag
The hips drop, the back arches, the shoulders come out in front of the wrists and you are doing a hard decline push-up with your head near the floor. If the line breaks, the set is over. Lower the surface next time.
Landing the head in front of the hands
The weight tips forward onto the wrists and out of the shoulders, which is uncomfortable in the wrist and useless in the shoulder. Down between the hands, every rep.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 6 | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 10 | One more set 2 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five sets next week. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
How is this different from the ordinary pike push-up?
The feet come up, and that changes how much of you the hands are holding. Feet elevated push-ups produced the highest peak force through the hands of every push-up variation in the study that measured them, while hands elevated produced the lowest1. The library keeps the two as separate movements so each one carries its own history.
Can a bodyweight press build anything?
For size, yes, on the same terms as a loaded one. Across twenty one trials where every set went to failure, light loads and heavy loads produced similar muscle growth, while heavy loads produced clearly more one repetition maximum strength2. What no study covers is this movement specifically: there is no published measurement of a pike push-up of any height against a loaded press.
What does Reckoner do when there is nothing to add?
It climbs the rep range and then adds a set, because volume is the only lever a bodyweight movement has. When it stalls there is no load to take back, so unlike a loaded lift there is no reset to try first: it goes straight to offering you the other movement in this group. Raising or lowering the surface is yours to do, and it is the real progression here.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Ebben and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011. Kinetic analysis of several variations of push-ups push-ups with the feet elevated producing a higher peak vertical ground reaction force than every other push-up variation measured, and hands elevated and flexed knee push-ups producing a lower one
- Schoenfeld, Grgic, Ogborn and Krieger, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2017. Strength and Hypertrophy Adaptations Between Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis twenty one studies of sets taken to momentary failure showing similar hypertrophy across the loading spectrum and significantly greater one repetition maximum gains with heavy loads