How to do a proper push up with perfect form

Before you lower an inch, your body has to hold one shape: a straight, rigid line from the top of your head to your heels. Squeeze your glutes, brace your midsection as if you are about to be prodded in the stomach, and keep your ribs down so your lower back does not sag. That braced plank is not a detail on top of the push up. It is the push up. Everything else is just lowering and raising that plank.

Two failures break the plank. The first is sagging hips, where the middle drops toward the floor and the lower back takes the strain. The second is piking hips, where the backside pokes up in the air to shorten the range and make each rep easier. Both mean your core has quit and you are no longer training the movement you think you are. If you cannot hold a solid plank for twenty seconds, work on that first, because it sets the ceiling on your push up.

Look down at yourself from above at the bottom of a push up. If your arms make a straight letter T with your body, elbows pointing out to the sides, you are in the position most likely to grind your shoulders over time. That flared position also puts your chest and triceps at a poor angle to press from, so it is weaker as well as harsher.

Instead, tuck your elbows so your upper arms sit at roughly a 45 degree angle to your torso, making more of an arrow shape than a T. Your hands sit about shoulder width or slightly wider, roughly under your chest rather than up by your face. From there your triceps and chest do the pressing from a strong, joint friendly position, and your shoulders are far happier for it.

The single most common way people fake push ups is cutting the range. They dip a few centimetres, bounce, and call it a rep. A real push up travels the full distance: down until your chest is a couple of centimetres off the floor, and back up until your elbows are straight, without letting the plank break at either end.

1. Set your plank and grip. Hands about shoulder width or slightly wider, roughly under your chest. Body a straight braced line, glutes and midsection tight, neck neutral so you are looking at the floor a little ahead of you.
2. Lower under control. Bend your elbows and lower your whole body as one rigid unit, elbows tucked to about 45 degrees. Take one to two seconds down. Your chest leads, your hips do not sag.
3. Touch low, then press. Lower until your chest is a couple of centimetres from the floor, or lightly grazes it, keeping the plank. Do not rest your body on the ground and collapse the tension.
4. Press all the way up. Push the floor away and drive back up until your elbows are straight and you are back in the top plank. Keep your body a straight line the entire time. That is one rep.

Training a muscle through its full range, especially the stretched bottom position, tends to build at least as much strength and size as short partial reps, and often more. For the push up, that means the bottom, chest near the floor, is not the scary part to avoid. It is the part that builds your chest and triceps. Full range honest reps beat a huge pile of shallow ones every time.

People underrate the push up because it uses no weights, but the load is real. When researchers put people on force plates in a push up position, the hands supported a large share of body weight, more at the bottom of the movement than the top.

Those figures come from a study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research that measured trained men in static push up positions. The exact numbers vary with your build and how far forward your hands sit, but the message is clear: a full push up is a genuine strength exercise, and even the knee version is far from nothing. Treat push ups with the same respect you give a barbell lift.

The push up scales in both directions, which is why it stays useful whether you are starting out or already strong. The trick is to change the difficulty while keeping the plank and the full range intact.

To make them easier, raise your hands. Push against a wall, then a kitchen counter, then a bench, then the floor. The higher your hands, the less body weight you press, and crucially you keep the full straight body plank rather than dropping to your knees. Incline push ups are the cleanest way to build toward your first floor push up because they train the exact movement you are working toward. Knee push ups also work, but they change the body line, so use inclines first where you can.

To make them harder, do the reverse. Elevate your feet on a bench to shift more load onto your upper body. Slow the lowering phase down to three or four seconds. Add pauses at the bottom. Move your hands closer together to hit the triceps harder, or add a resistance band or a weight plate on your back once bodyweight becomes easy. There is no ceiling here that a bit of creativity cannot raise.