Here’s Exactly How to Do the Perfect Push-Up Every Time

Push-ups are a fantastic exercise for your chest, arms, shoulders and core — but only if you take the time to learn proper push-up form. If you make it a habit to do this exercise correctly every time, the movement will quickly become second nature, minimizing your risk of injury.

Many elements of proper push-up form remain the same no matter what kind of push-up variation you decide to tackle. And without fail, you’ll be starting from a plank. Here’s how to set yourself up for a push-up, along with the most common mistakes you might find yourself making:

Sounds pretty simple, right? And it is — but there are a few things that commonly go wrong, especially for beginners.

One of the first is your hand position. It’s tempting to walk your hands too far forward, so that when you lower down, they’re under your face instead of your shoulders. But to get the proper leverage, your hands should stay in line with your shoulders.

Next up: Check your body alignment. Imagine a straight line between your head and your heels. It’s very common for your hips to either pike up above that line or sag below it, but neither is correct. Instead, focus on keeping your hips in line with your head and your heels. Think about drawing your bellybutton toward your spine (to contract your abs).

The position described above is commonly referred to as the “up” push-up position, because your body is at the top of the exercise. Once you’re in a plank, you’ll bend your arms and lower yourself into the “down” position. Lastly, you’ll push back up. Here’s how to do it properly:

There are a handful of common mistakes that can be hard ‌not‌ to make.

The first is your arm position: Even when you start out in an appropriate push-up position, it’s not uncommon for beginners to let their shoulders creep up toward their ears. If you were to look down from above, the resulting position looks a bit like they’re trying to wear their shoulders as earrings.

Take a hint from the American Council on Exercise: You don’t want to let your elbows flare out too far during the exercise. Don’t let them point out directly to the sides, but don’t keep them tucked against your body (unless you’re doing triceps push-ups).

Another thing to pay close attention to is your body position. Even if you ‌started‌ in the right position, it’s common for your hips to sag up or down as you move through the motion of the push-up — and you might not be aware of that happening. It helps to have a workout buddy watch your form, or you can use a mirror to check your own form.

Push-ups are a challenging exercise, forcing you to lift about 75 percent of your body weight, according to The Cooper Institute. If you can’t do a complete set of standard push-ups, don’t worry ⁠— you’re far from alone, and you can work up to them.

The trick is to fit the exercise to suit your current strength level, because if you compromise your form as a way of pushing through those full push-ups, you’ll be decreasing the benefit you get from the exercise, while increasing your risk of injury.

With that in mind, incline push-ups are an excellent variation for most people:

Once you can do 15 incline push-ups, try adding 1 to 2 full push-ups at the start of your set. Then, finish out the set with your usual modified push-up form. Before you know it, you’ll be able to do 3 of 4 push-ups at the beginning of your set, then 5 and so on, until you can manage a full set of push-ups with no modifications at all.

Now that you have the basics down, it’s time to address some details. First, how far down should you should go in your push-ups? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer here.

If you ask a dozen experts, you’ll get at least a handful of different answers. In large part, choosing the appropriate range of motion for ‌you‌ depends on your upper-body strength and shoulder stability. When you go far down into a push-up, you’re putting your shoulders into an inherently unstable position known as external rotation.

So if your shoulders are injured or otherwise unstable, you should stick to a more conservative range of motion. Often, this means stopping when your shoulders break the plane of your elbows — or even sooner to maintain a pain-free range of motion.

With that said, your body will adapt to the challenges you give it. If you’re training for a sport or activity that requires extended range of motion in your shoulders (or if developing a full range of motion is one of your goals), you’ll want to work up to a greater range of motion.

If that’s the case, try to lower yourself until your chest touches the floor. Keep in mind, though, that not everybody’s shoulders will accommodate this range of motion.

Only go as low as you can without pain and make sure you remain in full control of the movement throughout each rep. Not only does this make your muscles work harder (which ultimately means more benefit for you), it helps protect you from accidentally pushing your shoulders too far into external rotation.

Another commonly asked question is, “How many should I do?” Again, this depends on your fitness level and goals: If you’re working to develop upper-body endurance, aim for a higher number of push-ups; if you’re building strength or power, focus on progressing into harder variations, like the sphinx push-up.

To get yourself started, follow the recommendations from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services physical activity guidelines for Americans: One set of 8 to 12 reps, done twice a week, is enough to reap health benefits and build strength. And doing 2 or 3 sets at each session can offer even more benefit. Then, you can then adjust from there, depending on your goals.

If you don’t have a specific goal beyond getting fit, here’s a number to aim for: In a February 2019 study in ‌JAMA Network Open‌, researchers followed 1,104 “occupationally active” middle-aged adult men over a 10-year period. They found that participants who had been able to do more than 40 push-ups during the initial evaluation were significantly less likely to have a cardiovascular disease event during the follow-up period.

That doesn’t mean push-ups are a magic cure for cardiovascular disease, although they’re certainly good for you. Instead, it identified push-ups as a convenient, inexpensive means of measuring the fitness levels that can also affect your heart health.

The researchers are quick to note that because their cohort of subjects was restricted to such specific criteria, they’re not sure whether the results can be generalized to other populations, such as women, older people or less-active people. But the study’s benchmark of 40 push-ups nonetheless gives you a great goal to aim for if you’re looking for a fun reason to challenge yourself.