Push-Up Progression

Workout 1 - a tailored workout routine designed for individuals who may have minimal strength to push themselves up. This includes overweight individuals with limited muscle mass, those recovering from a prolonged illness resulting in strength loss, and individuals who have lived a sedentary lifestyle for an extended period and thus have little to no strength.

Workout 2 - designed for individuals who already possess some strength and are closer to performing standard push-ups. In terms of exercise selection, follow the template by choosing the most challenging variation manageable.

To properly warm up for the push-up, you simply need to warm up the muscles around the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints by moving them around with intent or doing some named mobility movements. Then, do some warm-up sets for the main exercise. For example:

Light Mobility Drill: Shoulder Circles -> Shoulder Corkscrews -> Elbow Circles -> Wrist Rotations for a round or two with enough reps for you to feel them working.

Warm-Up Set/s: You can either increase the incline of your push-ups or do some other relatively easy pushing exercise and do some reps far from failure to use and warm up the same muscle groups.

Just make sure that whatever you do is just enough to work and warm up your muscles, not tire them, so you can perform your best in your working sets.

Choose a pushing exercise that has a similar movement pattern to that of the standard push-up that you can do near failure within the specified rep range. It doesn't really matter where you currently are, as long as you can move around and don't have any health complications limiting you from doing so. You can even use the wall while standing almost straight up to train for it. The stronger you become, the easier it will be for you to perform push-ups with a more horizontal body alignment.

Alternatively, it's also possible to work with machines and freeweights instead to unlock the push-up if you like to do it that way. It may even be more efficient since you can easily adjust the intensity. You just gotta train the chest and triceps with some front delts and core stability, the main muscle groups/components used in push-ups.

You simply have to choose or modify an exercise for you to be able to do that within the specified rep range to build both strength and muscle mass on the main muscle groups involved.

Determine what your limiting factors are in your push-up training, then choose exercises for those. These typically include core stability, scapular control (depression and protraction), wrist mobility, and other lagging muscle group/s.

The template recommends 2 to 4 sets for the main exercise. Leaning toward the higher end — 3 to 4 sets — tends to be more beneficial if you are relatively new to training. Research shows that less-trained individuals voluntarily activate a smaller percentage of their available motor unit pool — even at maximal effort — leaving more motor units unstimulated per set.

Additional sets provide more high-effort recruitment opportunities before fatigue accumulates and begins limiting motor unit recruitment. As neural efficiency improves with training, each set becomes more effective at reaching higher-threshold motor units, and 2 to 3 sets may be sufficient.

This is a strength-specific progression where training frequency matters — more sessions mean more neural practice opportunities. Keeping each session manageable enough to recover fully before the next one is what sustains that frequency. While 1–2 RIR is generally better for this reason, it's still useful to go to task failure (0 RIR) early on when you don't yet have a feel for what near-failure is, to avoid undertraining.

With this, you should compensate for it by ensuring other training variables are optimized for recovery, like nutrition, sleep, stress management, and overall training volume. But then, after getting the hang of the feeling of going until failure, it's better to stay in 1 - 2 RIR and use going until failure sparingly.

For strength progressions like this, a relatively high training frequency is beneficial — more sessions mean more practice opportunities, which primarily drives the neural and motor pattern adaptations behind skill-based strength gains. Fatigue is an unavoidable byproduct of training, so the goal is to keep each session's effort manageable enough to recover fully before the next one. Every other day or 2–3 times a week are both reasonable options, the latter providing a slightly longer recovery window between sessions.

After some time of consistency, you will eventually feel like what you're doing is becoming a little easier or that you've gotten stronger. By that time, you can start trying a harder variation or decreasing the height of where you push yourself up so your body will lean to be more horizontal.

For example, if you're starting from wall push-ups, depending on your height, you can start doing push-ups on something lower than that where you put your hands on the wall, like a table or even a staircase. Keep doing that whenever you get stronger and you'll eventually be able to do standard push-ups on the floor.

When you can finally rep out a standard push-up quite easily, considering you do it with full ROM, you can start trying harder variations of the push-up. However, depending on how long you stay in a variation and gain strength there, you can skip a variation.

Generally, you can try doing so in such a manner:

Standard Push-Up -> Decline Push-Up -> Narrow Push-Up -> Wide Push-Up -> Staggered Push-Up -> Archer Push-Up -> Typewriter Push-Up -> Supported One Arm Push-Up -> One Arm Push-Up

Some of you may notice and wonder why the Pseudo Planche Push-Up and Pike Push-Up are not included in the order; it is because they have different mechanics where the load is mostly on the shoulders, regardless of being called 'push-ups'.