reckonerVest push-up
The push-up that goes back to being a lift you add weight to. Once the reps and the sets have run out, a vest is the only thing that puts a number back on the movement, and the number behaves the way a bench press number does.
Body in one line, chest to the floor.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, triceps, front delts
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor, weight vest
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Load the vest evenly and strap it tight
Weight balanced front and back, straps pulled in so nothing moves. A vest that slides down toward your shoulders as you press moves the load somewhere you did not plan and takes your line with it.
Set the plank with the vest on
Hands under the shoulders or a little wider, glutes squeezed, belly braced hard. The extra weight sits on your back, which is exactly where a sagging middle starts, so this brace has to be tighter than the one you use without it.
Lower with the elbows back
Chest to an inch off the floor, elbows traveling back at about forty five degrees rather than out to the sides. Nose, chest and hips arrive together, the same standard as an unloaded push-up.
Press away and finish the top
Push up and spread the shoulder blades apart at the very top. That last inch is the first thing a vest takes away from you, and it is the part worth keeping.
What goes wrong
Adding the vest before the range is clean
Weight on top of a short rep buys you a heavier short rep. Get to the top of the rep range on the floor, chest down every time, and then load it.
Wearing a vest that swings
A loose vest shifts on every rep, so no two reps are the same and the log stops meaning anything. Strap it in until it moves with you.
Jumping the load
A vest usually loads in small plates for a reason. Move in the smallest step the vest actually has, which is the step shown in the fact block at the top of this page, and let the rep range do the rest.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 kg, 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 11 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 1 kg to 11 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
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 loaded push-up a real substitute for a bench press?
Closer than most people expect. Across a range of vest loads, push-ups and bench presses showed no differences in kinematics or upper body muscle activation in trained men, and the authors concluded a vest lets a push-up mimic bench press intensities1. A separate eight week study found push-up training matched a light bench press for chest thickness and strength2.
How heavy a vest do I need?
Enough that the top of your rep range is genuinely hard, and no more. Reckoner treats this as a loaded lift from the first rep, so it adds weight the way it does to any other press rather than adding sets.
Why is this a separate movement from a push-up?
Because they progress differently. A bodyweight push-up runs out of weight and grows by reps and sets, and this one has weight to add, so each keeps its own history. They sit in the same swap group, so Reckoner can move you between them.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- van den Tillaar, Sports Medicine International Open, 2019. Comparison of Kinematics and Muscle Activation between Push-up and Bench Press no differences in kinematics or upper body muscle activation between weight vest push-ups and bench presses across four matched loads in resistance-trained men, and the conclusion that a vest lets a push-up mimic bench press intensities
- 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