reckonerIncline push-up
The push-up with your hands up on something. Raising the hands takes weight off them without taking anything out of the movement, so you keep the whole line and the whole range while you get strong enough to do it on the floor. It is a staircase, not a lesser exercise.
Hips in line, chest to the surface.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, triceps, front delts
- 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
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Find something that will not move
A bench, a windowsill, a bar in a rack, the third step of a staircase. Test it with your bodyweight before you trust it. A surface that slides turns the easiest push-up in the library into the most dangerous one.
Set the same plank you would on the floor
Hands under the shoulders or a little wider, feet back, glutes squeezed, belly braced. One straight line from your ears to your heels. Nothing about the position changes because your hands went up.
Come down to the surface
Lower until your chest touches whatever your hands are on, elbows traveling back at about forty five degrees rather than straight out to the sides. Touching is the standard, the same way chest to floor is the standard on the ground.
Push away and finish the top
Press up and spread the shoulder blades apart at the very top. That last inch is the part almost everybody leaves out, and it is easier to learn here than it is on the floor.
What goes wrong
Picking a height that is not hard
Elevating the hands lowers the load on them, and in a force plate comparison hands elevated push-ups produced lower ground reaction force than every other variation tested1. Go high enough to keep the line and no higher, then come down a step when the top of the rep range gets comfortable.
Doing it on your knees instead
A knees down push-up changes how much of you the arms hold, and it changes it more between the top and the bottom of the rep than the full version does2. The incline keeps the whole line and the whole range. Use the incline.
Letting the hips lead the way down
The hips sag first, the lower back takes it and the range quietly shortens. The line is the exercise here as much as the press is: if the line breaks, the set is over.
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 an incline push-up worth doing, or is it just an easier one?
It is worth doing. Push-up training at a load matched to a light bench press produced the same chest thickness and strength gains as the bench press itself over eight weeks3, and the incline is how you set that load without any equipment.
How do I know when to move down a step?
When you finish the top of your rep range without the line breaking and without the last rep being a fight. Reckoner climbs the rep range for you and tells you when the range is finished, and the height is the part you own.
What does Reckoner do when there is no weight to add?
It climbs the rep range, then adds a set, because volume is the only lever a bodyweight movement has. Lowering the surface is yours to do, and the library has this and the floor push-up as separate movements so each keeps its own history.
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 peak vertical ground reaction force being lower for hands elevated push-ups than for all other push-up variations measured
- Suprak, Dawes and Stephenson, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011. The effect of position on the percentage of body mass supported during traditional and modified push-up variants a greater change in the percentage of body mass supported between the up and down positions in the knees down push-up than in the traditional push-up
- Kikuchi and Nakazato, Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness, 2017. Low-load bench press and push-up induce similar muscle hypertrophy and strength gain comparable pectoralis major thickness and bench press strength gains between push-up training and load matched bench press training over eight weeks