reckonerFist push-up
The push-up for a wrist that does not want to bend backward. On your palms the wrist is held near the end of its range while it carries a large share of you. Closing your fists takes that angle out and leaves the pressing exactly as it was.
On flat fists, wrists straight.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, triceps, front delts
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- 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
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Make a real fist and keep it
Fingers rolled in, thumb outside, knuckles flat. You are pressing through the two big knuckles at the base of the index and middle fingers. A loose fist collapses under load and puts you back where you started.
Line the forearm up with the fist
Set the fists under your shoulders with the flat of each hand facing in, so the forearm, wrist and hand make one straight line. That line is the whole exercise. Check it before the first rep.
Put something under the knuckles
A mat, a folded towel, a rug. This is not a toughness question. Bare knuckles on a hard floor makes people shift their hand position mid set, which loses the straight wrist you came for.
Press exactly as you would on your palms
Set the plank, elbows traveling back at about forty five degrees, chest to an inch off the floor, spread the shoulder blades at the top. Nothing above the wrist changes.
What goes wrong
Letting the wrist bend inside the fist
The fist stays closed and the wrist quietly folds back anyway, so you are doing a palm push-up with worse contact. In a force study the load through a bent back wrist traveled further toward the back and outside of the joint than it did on a neutral one1. Straight forearm to fist, every rep.
Turning the fists in or out
Rotating them changes the direction the wrist is asked to resist and takes the joint off the straight line. Knuckles facing forward, thumbs pointing at each other, and leave them there.
Using it to train through wrist pain
This variation removes an angle. It does not treat anything. Tell Reckoner your wrist is a problem and it takes the other push-ups out of your plan and leaves this one standing, because it is the only one in the family the library does not flag for wrists.
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
Is a fist push-up safer for the wrist?
The research points that way and stops short of certainty. A motion capture study of push-ups on a bent back wrist against a neutral one concluded that the neutral version is likely safer, because the forces spread differently through the joint1. In a separate model of the loaded, extended wrist, force shifted onto the scaphoid2. Both describe forces rather than injuries.
Do push-up handles do the same thing?
They hold the wrist straight the same way and they are kinder on the knuckles. The library carries the fist version because it needs nothing at all, which is the point of the whole push-up family.
Does it build bigger forearms?
Reckoner records forearms as secondary work on this movement and not on the palms down version, because holding the fist is real work. What that adds up to over a block is not something this page can put a number on.
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
- Polovinets, Wolf and Wollstein, Journal of Hand Therapy, 2018. Force transmission through the wrist during performance of push-ups on a hyperextended and a neutral wrist forces traveling more dorsally over a wider area and more ulnarly in the hyperextended wrist, and the authors' conclusion that push-ups on a neutral wrist are likely safer
- Majima and colleagues, Journal of Hand Surgery, 2008. Load transmission through the wrist in the extended position force transmission shifting radially and concentrating at the scaphoid when the wrist is loaded in maximum extension