The push-up is one of the most fascinating exercises in the world. On the one hand, It’s so challenging that one-third of a survey conducted on 1,400 Americans believed they’d struggle to complete just five push-ups in a row. (1)
On the other hand, the humble push-up is often programmed as a very basic display of upper-body fitness. You won’t get far in the world of online fitness programs without coming across this well-known bodyweight move — it is, after all, one of the best chest exercises for a reason.
As such, the 100-push-ups-a-day protocol remains a coveted benchmark for anyone intent on getting in shape and building a ripped upper body. But the 100 push-ups challenge may not be as beneficial as it seems, depending on the kind of athlete you are. So, is 100 push-ups a day good? Read on to find out. You’ll get plenty of insights from our certified personal trainer along the way.
How to Do the Push-Up
Before you can do 100 push-ups, you need to know how to do one push-up. This is the progression of steps you should follow in order to execute a picture-perfect push-up:
- Assume a standard face-down plank position, with a fully straightened and extended body, and a stable base.
- Station your feet together with your toes touching the ground.
- Place your palms flat on the floor at the level of your chest, and plant them slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
- Make sure that your arms are straight while you maintain your head in a neutral position with your eyes looking slightly ahead of your body.
- Lower your chest to the ground by bending at your elbows and maintain control over your body and its alignment.
- Preserve the straight line from your shoulders right through your spine and legs and down to your heels as you lower your torso to the ground.
- Pause briefly at the bottom of the movement when your chest makes contact with the floor without relaxing your core.
- Press yourself back to your starting position.
[Read More: A One Month Push-Up Training Program for Beginners (3 Days Per Week)]
Make It Easier: Perform this move with your hands on a wall or from your knees. If you’re opting for this, be extra sure to keep your core engaged, trying to keep your shoulders and hips aligned.
Make It Harder: Do 1 ½ reps, meaning you’ll sink all the way into a full rep, push halfway up, sink back down, and then come back to the starting position. That will be one rep.
Push-Up Variations and Modifications
There are many types of push-ups, and you don’t have to do 100 of the same type. In fact, it’ll probably benefit you more to integrate different types of push-up variations into your challenge.
Here are some of the best push-up variations that you’ll want to try:
- Kneeling Push-Ups
- Wall Push-Ups
- Decline Push-Ups
- Incline Push-Ups
- Weighted Push-Ups
- 1 ½ Rep Push-Ups
- Plyometric Push-Ups
- Spider Push-Ups
- Stagger Push-Ups
- Deficit Push-Ups
- Close-Grip Push-Ups
For any of these push-up variations, you can perform them from your knees. Keep your core engaged and breathe deeply into your belly during all of these reps. Make sure to cushion your knees when needed for added comfort.
How to Program 100 Push-Ups a Day
“There’s certainly nothing magical about doing 100 push-ups each day,” says Alex Polish, an American Council on Exercise Certified Personal Trainer (CPT) and BarBend’s Senior Editor. “But — as with anything in fitness — you might have your heart set on the accomplishment just because it’s on social media. As long as you’re not pushing yourself too hard or using terrible form, there’s nothing necessarily bad about that. Just spend some time thinking about what your goals are.”
[Read More: 7 Powerful Benefits of Plyometric Push-Ups to Help You Go Higher, Further, Faster]
Polish recommends varying your push-up styles if your goal is to build overall muscle and strength. “By using different angles, you’ll get the most bang for your proverbial buck.” They advise you to try out the following combination in your 100-push-ups-a-day program:
- 25 reps of incline push-ups
- 25 reps of decline push-ups
- 25 reps of ‘regular’ push-ups
- 25 reps of triceps or close-grip push-ups
Varying your exercise angles like that will help make sure that you’re not just chasing some arbitrary number, Polish explains. You’ll be giving yourself a more well-rounded approach to chest hypertrophy and strength.
Polish also recommends making sure you’re doing plenty of pulling as you ramp up your pushing volume. If you’re trying to get after 100 push-ups a day because you’re training at home with no bench press equipment in sight, make sure you’re putting enough back exercises in the mix so it’s not all about the muscles in the front of your body.
He recommends supersets or otherwise supplementing your push-ups with the following low-to-no-equipment back movements:
- Supermans
- Band Pull-Aparts
- Reverse Snow Angels
- Wall Walks
- Inchworms
- Y-Raises
- Inverted Rows
When it comes to high-volume bodyweight training, the key is to pace yourself, Polish says. Even someone who can bench three plates could burn themselves to a crisp if they tried to do all 100 in a single set.
[Read More: Plyometric Push-Ups vs Regular – Which Is Best for Power, Strength, and Overall Fitness?]
Your best bet is to break this task down into small, manageable chunks. Think as few as 10 push-ups every hour, or five every half-hour — whatever you need to do to ensure sound technique and consistent performance.
As you gain strength and muscular endurance, you can look toward performing more push-ups in a single set. Five sets of 20 push-ups every fifteen minutes would get the job done pretty quickly.
How to Do 100 Push-Ups a Day for Beginners
As a newbie, it’s going to be a huge deal to lock in your first push-up — let alone your first 100. Take it easy on yourself and meet yourself where you’re at. You don’t want to get into overtraining. So, if you’re still shaky on your hands, wait a while to start this challenge.
But when your muscles are ready, you can acclimate yourself. But first, Polish says, you have to build up your tolerance.
Your best and safest option is to gradually work up to 100 daily push-ups over time before making it a daily routine. Performing 20, then 30, then 40 total push-ups every other day for a few weeks is a good option until you can hit 100. Then, try 100 push-ups on two sequential days before taking some rest. If you’re patient and tolerant, your body will eventually acclimate to the demand.
[Read More: 3 Most Common Push-Up Mistakes (With CrossFit Athlete Meg Reardon)]
“When the time comes, you don’t have to do huge sets,” Polish says. “Just set yourself an alarm for every half hour or so. Doing 10 push-ups every 30 minutes will get you there in a few hours’ time.”
Can’t do full push-ups? That’s OK, Polish insists. “Do your reps from your knees if need be,” he encourages. “That’s not ‘cheating’ or doing ‘fake’ push-ups — it’s doing the type of movement that works best for your body, which is what fitness is all about.”
If you want to do this challenge once a week, you can. Polish recommends trying to add just a single rep per set each week. So, if the first week you did five reps per set, try to do six reps per set the next week. This linear progression style can work quite well for beginners, they explain.
How to Do 100 Push-Ups a Day for Experienced Athletes
How many basic push-ups can you currently do with good form? Say that you’ll hit failure around 25 reps. In that case, Polish advises doing 20 reps, recovering, then going again — stopping about five reps short of failure per set — until you hit 100 total. You can be done in a few minutes, depending on your fitness level and comfort with push-ups.
As with beginners, don’t go right from doing 20 push-ups sometimes to 100 in a day. Instead, gradually add sets to increase your volume over the course of a few weeks.
[Read More: Turn Your Training On Its Head With the Handstand Push-Up]
Once you get to 100, to really make the most of your training, do different sets at different angles. You’ll be able to bias different fibers in your chest muscles and upper body muscles by integrating decline, incline, “regular,” and close-grip push-ups into the mix.
“If you can’t do nearly as many close-grip push-ups as you can decline push-ups, for example, the numbers don’t have to be the same,” Polish explains. Just keep track of how many reps you do of each type of push-up, they advise. The next time you try the challenge, see if you can do more of your weaker variation, strengthening it over time.
Benefits of Doing 100 Push-Ups a Day
In addition to maintaining a big pec pump on a near-constant basis, you stand to gain quite a bit in terms of general fitness by making 100 push-ups as regularly as brushing your teeth. Here’s what’s on offer:
More Upper Body Strength
The push-up is the bedrock of upper-body training for a reason. Researchers commonly use it as a means of evaluating strength and general fitness. For instance, one study used push-up performance to predict bench press strength. (2)
[Read More: Bench Press Vs Push-Up: Which Is Best for Strength, Mass, and Power?]
Their data illustrated that proficiency in the push-up directly correlated with bench press strength, albeit up to a point. However, what is clear is that mastery over your own body via the push-up should result in higher power output in comparable exercises.
Improved Muscular Endurance
One of the reasons push-ups are so widely utilized as an all-purpose fitness testing tool is because they force you to use your chest, shoulder, and triceps muscles to repeatedly press yourself off of the floor while your core strains to maintain proper alignment.
“Yes, the push-up is about your chest,” Polish says, “but the unsung hero here is your core.”
[Read More: Warm Up Your Wrists, Arms, and Shoulders With This Push-Up Routine]
While all of your muscles responsible for pushing movements are firing away, your abdominals will be struggling to hold your body in a tight line. All of this adds up to one heck of an endurance workout, especially for your abs, simply due to the tremendous amount of time spent under tension.
Better Body Awareness
“Doing push-ups — especially at such a high volume — is a mental game almost as much as a physical one,” Polish explains. “It’s a simple exercise in some ways, but you’re also controlling your entire body throughout each rep. And then, once you start approaching failure, you’ve got to keep going even while maintaining great form.”
The body awareness and mental toughness you get from that is relatively unmatched by other bodyweight exercises. The more time you spend in a push-up position, the greater your overall awareness of body positioning during training becomes.
You will rapidly learn that whenever your body is arched, slumped, elevated, or angled, it influences the muscles involved in your push-ups and the overall ease or difficulty of completing them. As a result, you’ll learn to identify how positional changes like these can alter the effects of other exercises, as well.
Drawbacks of Doing 100 Push-Ups a Day
It’s not all push-ups and roses, though. There are some potential drawbacks here.
“Yes, it’s generally safe to do push-ups — but doing anything at such a high volume can increase your injury risk,” Polish explains. “Make sure your recovery is dialed in, that you’re warming up your joints and eating and sleeping enough, especially if you’re doing other kinds of strength training in addition to your 100-push-up quests.”
But there can also be the opposite problem, too. Eventually, 100 push-ups may simply not be challenging enough to contribute to your progress. When that enviable problem occurs, never fear — you’ve simply got to switch it up. Use different kinds of push-ups and incorporate tempo training to reinvigorate the challenge.
“Sinking slowly to the bottom position, then pausing there before pushing all the way back up is a much different beast than rushing your way through 100 reps,” Polish says. “Try slowing your reps down and focusing on producing 100 perfect reps, and you’ll likely get hit with a challenge all over again.”
Who Should Do 100 Push-Ups a Day
100 daily push-ups might make for a wonderful at-home exercise routine, but they’re good for far more than that. Before you take the plunge, consider whether you fall into one of these camps.
High School or Collegiate Athletes
Push-ups are commonly used as a training tool for many athletic coaches from middle school upward. This is especially true for athletes who are asked to complete the dreaded “up-down” on a frequent basis, like football players, lacrosse players, and wrestlers.
While the constant requests for push-ups may seem like a mean-spirited demand, if you’re a participant in one of these sports, daily push-ups will equip you to get up at a moment’s notice even if you’ve repeatedly been knocked down.
Physical Fitness Test-Takers
If you find yourself entering any profession where strength and fitness standards are mandated, there is a high likelihood that a push-up test is going to be administered to you. Several regional and national police and firefighting organizations recommend assessment tests involving push-ups.
[Read More: Get Freakishly Strong With the 5×5 Workout Program]
In most instances, scores of 30 or more consecutive push-ups are required to achieve a passing mark. This means that if you can complete 100 push-ups every day in three or fewer sets, you should have little difficulty surpassing the minimum acceptable score in these testing scenarios.
Athletes Who Want a New Challenge at Home
“Folks who primarily work out at home — maybe without a lot of equipment — often like having a concrete goal to strive for,” Polish says. “In the gym, you can focus on the number of plates on the bar. But at home, you’ve got things like tempo and rep count. Having a nice round number to strive for can be a great and fun motivator, which is what a lot of people are searching for in their routines.”
Who Shouldn’t Do 100 Push-Ups a Day?
Make no mistake, daily anything isn’t for everyone. You might want to steer clear of a 100-push-up ritual in cases like these:
If You’re Injured
If you’ve got any sort of upper-body injury, and especially any injuries to the chest, shoulders, or arms, high-volume push-ups are probably a bad idea. The shoulders, elbows, and wrists are common sites for the development of chronic tendinopathies as well.
[Read More: How to Work Around a Rotator Cuff Injury]
Conditions like tendinitis are liable to worsen if exposed to repeated stress, such as forcing yourself through a three-digit number of push-ups in a single day. No matter what physical ailment you’re suffering from, you should defer to the advice of a medical professional before taking any kind of action.
If You’re New to Exercise
Yes, beginners can work toward this goal. But if you can only complete four push-ups at a time, then painfully plodding through dozens of low-rep push-up sets until you can complete 100 total reps is overkill for your muscles.
If you are just beginning to string together consecutive push-ups and need to build up your resilience, working your way up to three or four sets of 10 to 12 repetitions should be the first milestone you pursue. From there, you can build upon that foundation and gradually work your way up to sets of 20 to 25 and onward. Slow and steady wins the race.
If Push-Ups Are Too Easy
While its triple-digit nature makes 100 push-ups a desirable achievement in the eyes of many people, 100 is actually a rather arbitrary number to set as a daily push-up goal. Realistically, reaching the 100 push-ups threshold might be a sign that you’ve outgrown the push-up in the first place.
[Read More: What Are Workout Splits? Top 3 Most Effective Routines]
There’s no need to add volume to your training just for bragging rights, Polish says. “Adding ‘junk volume,’ or training loads that aren’t going to actually help you improve, can eat into your recovery needs and actually hurt you in the long term,” they explain. “That said, if you’re deriving emotional satisfaction from having this goal and keeping it up, that’s OK too — as long as you’re recovering well and not putting yourself at greater injury risk.”
That said, you don’t have to condemn the push-up to the waste bin altogether just because 100 standard repetitions are easy pickings. Progress into harder variations such as single-arm or weighted push-ups (whether with a resistance band or weight plate) and you’ll find yourself humbled by the push-up all over again.
FAQs
The people want to know, and our experts have answers.
Push-ups primarily work your chest, triceps, shoulders, and serratus anterior. Especially as a beginner, you may also notice your core getting in a lot of work, too, since you’re essentially holding a moving plank.
Decline push-ups will bias toward your upper chest fibers, incline push-ups will bias toward your lower chest fibers, and close-grip or diamond push-ups will place more emphasis on your triceps.
That depends. If you’re a beginner, this is a tremendous challenge and you’ll likely notice a lot of soreness — and a lot of growth in terms of strength and muscle mass. But if you try to do this every day, you may also notice nagging pains and potential injury risk, since you’ll be stressing your muscles and joints pretty intensely. Trying this challenge once every couple of weeks may be better.
For more advanced athletes, you may also experience some growth from this added chest volume — not to mention the added confidence that can come in at any level. But as you gain enough experience to do this more often throughout the week, you’ll benefit more from scaling up your options.
Alternate your angles with decline and incline push-ups, change your grip with a close-grip push-up, and even add weight. These added challenges will make this goal more effective for those with more upper-body strength and experience.
In terms of the exercise itself, then yes, push-ups are generally safe, especially for people without a history of upper body muscle or joint injuries. Your hands rest in a fixed position on a stable surface while all of the weight of the exercise is provided by your own body. If you maintain proper form, your risk of injury is generally quite low.
However, rapidly amping up your training volume can insert a level of risk into the equation; think of overuse injuries like tendinitis or chronic soreness. Research indicates that after you’ve broken your muscles down through training, they undergo a 48-hour process of reconstruction. (3)
Continually breaking down the same muscles every day without providing them with adequate muscle recovery time will limit your opportunities for maximum size and strength gains and may cross over into dangerous territory if you’re unacclimated to physical exercise.
Beyond this, it is also risky to perform challenging variations of the push-up before your body is strong enough to withstand them. Graduating to diamond push-ups, archer push-ups, or typewriter push-ups too quickly could place you in a compromising position if your muscles and joints are collectively unprepared to contend with the challenge they present.
As long as you’re wary of overtraining risks, there’s no concrete rule for a duration of time in which you should complete 100 push-ups each day. Case in point, football player, professional wrestler, and actor Woody Strode — for whom the famous cowboy doll Woody from the film Toy Story was named — was famous for doing at least 200 push-ups each day in four sets of 50.
In fact, Strode famously maintained both this training regimen and his chiseled chest from the time he was in college well into his 60s.
If doing 100 push-ups per day motivates you to stay active each day, and if you can remain injury-free, there is no compelling reason for you to ever stop doing so. On top of that, if you happen to be employed in a profession that requires you to prove your muscular endurance by completing as many push-ups as possible, there is arguably no better way to establish your preparedness than by completing push-ups in high volume frequently.
References
- Chadwick, Pat. (2021) Nationwide Survey Results: The Majority of Americans Cannot Do More Than 10 Consecutive Push-Ups. Gymless.
- Alizadeh S, Rayner M, Mahmoud MMI, Behm DG. Push-Ups vs. Bench Press Differences in Repetitions and Muscle Activation between Sexes. J Sports Sci Med. 2020 May 1;19(2):289-297.
- Morán-Navarro R, Pérez CE, Mora-Rodríguez R, de la Cruz-Sánchez E, González-Badillo JJ, Sánchez-Medina L, Pallarés JG. Time course of recovery following resistance training leading or not to failure. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2017 Dec;117(12):2387-2399.
