The humble push-up is possibly the most accessible, convenient, and easy-to-learn resistance exercise in existence. It can give you a great pump and works a ton of muscles, with many others being worked secondarily. The question is, can push-ups make you bigger?That is, can push-ups help you gain any significant amount of muscle?
As a type of resistance training, push-ups can help you gain a good amount of muscle. Just like lifting weights. If done correctly, push-ups can result in much larger arms, shoulders, and chest. Of course it will take some time, and your initial gains may be better than later ones. But by using intensity-increasing techniques, such as training to failure, and slow-reps, you can keep the muscle growth coming for years and get a lot bigger.
There’s a lot of people out there saying that push-ups are good for endurance and general exercise but that’s about it. Well these people are definitely mistaken! Resistance training can lead to muscle gain if the intensity and approach are right. Your muscles don’t know the difference between lifting weights and bodyweight exercises! Let’s discuss a little further.
Push-Ups Build Muscle
Any type of resistance training can build muscle. The stress of the exercise causes microtears in the muscle fibers, the body repairs them a tiny bit thicker, and you grow bigger. Push-ups provide very targeted stress to some muscle groups, namely your chest, shoulders, and triceps. To a much lesser degree, push-ups also indirectly also work your abs, back, and biceps. The hip flexors, hamstrings, quads, and calves provide stability but that’s about it. Don’t expect these to grow without some targeted leg work.
How Big Can You Get From Push-Ups?
To truly get huge, you will need to devote your entire life to the gym and to nutrition. You will probably need lots of training with heavy weights, and 8+ meals a day. This is what bodybuilders do, that is why they get massive, a 100% commitment to the sport is necessary, nobody gets hugely muscular by accident, and it’s certainly not easy.
So of course, you won’t turn into a mass monster bodybuilder, but the amount of muscle gain could be pretty significant. If you have never weight trained, 10-15 lbs of muscle is very possible in a year or less. Provided your nutrition is good, with plenty of protein, you can get a lot bigger. For most people, the results of 50+ push-ups a day will start to become visible in as little as a month.
10-15 lbs doesn’t sound like much but for a guy of average height that’s probably 1-2” on your arms, chest, and shoulders. Think about 10 lbs of beef in the grocery store, that’s huge!
With time, if you keep finding ways to increase your intensity, and keep your push-ups challenging, you can keep getting bigger – up to your genetic potential.
How Do You Get Bigger From Push-Ups? Keep The Intensity Up
When you are an out-of-shape newbie, just 20-30 push-ups a day will get your muscles growing. Very quickly, this will not be enough.
You will need to find ways to continue to keep your push-up workout challenging. This may be done with various modifications that can be made as to how you do your push-ups.
Some methods to increase the difficulty can be as simple as switching up your hand placement, narrower, wider, forward, or backward.
Also, there are other options available to you, like using blocks or push-up handles, elevating your feet and many others.
The most important thing is to push yourself hard if you want your muscles to grow bigger. If it’s easy, it won’t be effective.
Always Train To Failure
If you want to make your muscles grow, there are two important techniques you need to add to your push-up routine. The first is training to failure, (the other is slower negatives, as I will get to next). It is important to max out and push yourself as far as you can go with at least one set of your push-ups each time you train. Training to muscular failure is a good way to inflict the most stress on the targeted muscles.
Because of this, you should not go to failure on more than 3 sets in one session, especially if you are training daily. If you do push-ups daily, you need only go to failure on the last set or two.
Of course, this approach has its limits – especially once you build up some stamina. Once you can do 100+ reps in one set, you’ll need to tweak a few other things to increase the difficulty.
That being said, if you can reach 100 reps when going to failure on your first set, you’ll have a hard time getting near that number on any subsequent sets.
For instance, I can often get between 80-100 push-ups on my first all-out set to failure – but for my second set (after 2-3 mins rest) I’m lucky to get 30 non-stop reps! But I know that if I push myself to failure twice in a row, I will grow.
(Super) Slow Push-Ups
This is your number one tool to continue growing from push-ups. If you can hit the floor and do 50, 80,or even 100 push-ups with no problem, doing hundreds more each day will have diminishing returns in regards to muscle growth.
I would say 200 per day is the maximum number of daily push-ups that will have real benefit for getting bigger. This is what you should be shooting for during the first few months.
This is where doing the push-ups slower saves the day in creating a whole new level of difficulty!
Try a cadence of 1 second up, 3 seconds down. If this is not challenging enough for you, try 3 seconds up, 3 seconds down, or even slower.
A controlled negative will cause more trauma to the muscle fibers than the positive contraction leading to far more muscle growth. The slower, the better.
This is probably the most understated and least known fact in the world of resistance training:
Slow negatives grow more muscle than the positive (part of the movement).
In any resistance exercise, squats, bench press etc., Failing to do the negative portion of the movement in a slow and controlled manner will rob you of your gains. You can certainly get stronger and better at the exercise by doing exploding up and dropping the weight, or lowering it quickly. But the real damage to the muscle fibers – which results in a regrowth and thickening – occurs when you do slow negatives.
So do your push-ups slowly and you will keep growing for quite a while. You can gain many pounds of muscle just from push-ups – especially if you perform slow, or super slow reps.
Other Ways To Make Push-Ups More Effective
Position:
- Elevate legs
- Hands on blocks/push-up handles/bar
- Hands (and feet) on exercise ball (be careful)
- One legged
- One arm
- Narrow/wide arm stance
- Wide leg stance
Ways to add resistance:
- Have a friend lays on your back (use your own judgement about whether to use your girlfriend or… fat Uncle Jerry)
- Resistance bands – sling over your back and hold in each hand. These are available with various resistance levels.
- Weights in backpack – weights/books/bottles of water etc. all work well.
- Weighted vest – available for purchase at many sports retailers.
- Here’s a few more.
Plenty Of Anecdotal Evidence Too…
I’ll spare you the cliche stories, but there’s plenty of guys in the military and less gloriously, in jails and prisons who got pretty big doing mostly push-ups (and sometimes pull-ups). But anyone who has ever done a serious push-up workout will tell you that the soreness that can follow is definitely just like what you will experience after a heavy weights workout.
Push-ups won’t turn you into Mr Olympia, but you can definitely gain some serious muscle from them.
Don’t Forget To Keep Your Physique Balanced!
With all this talk about getting big from push-ups makes it easy to make the mistake of “overlooking” legs! Please don’t be that type of guy. If you can’t get to the gym, don’t worry, here’s a workout where you can train legs at home using body weight exercises.
Related Posts:
Push-Ups and Sit-Ups Are Not Cardio. Here’s Why.
Push-ups and sit-ups, or crunches, will certainly elevate your heart rate, but are anaerobic, or muscle strengthening in nature. They are not aerobic, or cardiovascular. They are generally performed in sets, not non-stop for 20+ mins as this is impractical because they use your muscles’ cells immediate energy source, ATP, which is used up very quickly and needs a few minutes to refill. So while push-ups and sit-ups will have many benefits, they will not burn as many calories or have the same heart and lung benefits as cardio.
What’s The Best Way To Do 200 Pushups?
I call the approach I use ‘PPM’ (Push-ups per minute). Place a clock or timer near you. You could watch a movie or TV show and have the timer running. Listen to music, whatever. Every minute, on the minute, do 10 push-ups as fast as you can, then rest and stretch for the rest of the minute. Continue this for 20 minutes. You will notice that at first this is really easy, but once you’ve got a few sets under your belt. To take a little bit longer. As the sets take longer, your rest periods become shorter, providing less recuperation for the following set. Your heart rate will be elevated for the entire 20 minutes, and for a few minutes afterwards. Providing a workout with a steadily increasing difficulty from warm up to final set.
