Push-Up Test by Age: How Many Push-Ups Should You Be Able to Do?

The push-up test is the cheapest fitness assessment in existence. No equipment, no gym, no appointment - you get on the floor, do as many clean push-ups as you can in one unbroken set, and write down the number. Trainers have used it for decades because it takes 90 seconds and it's hard to fake.

The number on its own is meaningless, though. Twenty-two push-ups is a middling score at 25 and a very good one at 45. Below are the norms fitness professionals actually work from, split by age and sex, along with the protocol that makes your score comparable to them - and an honest read on what the test does and doesn't tell you.

01 How to run the test properly

Most people who "test" their push-ups do it wrong in the same two ways: they rest at the top, and they cut the depth. Both inflate the score, which makes the chart useless. Here's the protocol the norms are built on.

• Warm up first. Five minutes of easy movement plus a set of 5-8 slow push-ups. Testing cold gives you a worse number and angrier shoulders.
• Set your hands shoulder-width apart, pointing forward, directly under your shoulders. Hips and shoulders aligned, trunk rigid, head neutral.
• Start in the down position. That's how the standard assessment begins, and it stops you from banking a free rep on the way in.
• Every rep counts to full lockout at the top and to a fist's height at the bottom. Put a rolled towel or a foam block under your chest so depth isn't a judgment call.
• No rest between reps. No hanging out at the top, no sagging into your hips, no downward dog. Steady and continuous.
• Stop the clock when you can't complete a rep, or when your technique breaks down for two consecutive reps. Only correctly performed reps go on the scorecard.

Test when you're fresh, not at the end of a workout, and write the number down the moment you finish. If you want it stored somewhere you'll still have it in six weeks, RepDrop keeps your max as a record you can compare against later.

02 Push-up norms by age and sex

These are the categories used in the push-up assessment taught by the American Council on Exercise, reprinted from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology's CSEP-PATH manual. They're the closest thing the field has to a common reference, and they're built from healthy adult population data rather than someone's gym anecdotes.

Men - full push-ups

Women - modified (knee) push-ups

Categories reprinted with permission from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology in the American Council on Exercise Push-up Assessment Protocol. Men are scored on standard push-ups, women on modified push-ups.

Two things stand out once you sit with the table. The first is how much it moves with age: a score that's merely Fair at 22 is Very good at 45. The second is how low the bar is at the bottom. A man in his forties needs 13 reps to clear Good. That's not an elite number - it's a number a lot of people could hit inside two months of deliberate practice.

03 Why the women's chart uses knee push-ups

This trips up nearly everyone who looks up push-up standards online, because most articles quietly skip it. The published protocol scores men on full push-ups and women on modified knee push-ups. The two columns are not measuring the same exercise, so you can't line them up side by side and draw conclusions about anything.

The practical consequence: if you're a woman who trains and can do full push-ups, the women's column will badly understate you. A knee push-up takes a meaningful share of your body weight off your arms by moving the pivot from your toes to your knees, so full push-ups are a substantially harder test. There's no equivalent full-push-up table for women carrying the same institutional weight behind it, which is a real gap in the literature.

What to do instead: test on whichever version you actually train, record which one you used, and treat your own previous score as the benchmark. Progress against yourself is more informative than a category label anyway. If you're testing on full push-ups and want a rough sense of where you stand, plenty of coaches use the men's column as an approximate reference - just know you're borrowing it, not matching it.

04 What your score actually predicts

The push-up test gets attention beyond the gym because of one well-known study. In 2019, researchers followed 1,104 active male firefighters, average age around 40, for ten years after a baseline push-up test. Men who completed more than 40 push-ups had dramatically fewer cardiovascular events over that decade than men who couldn't reach 10 - the reported rate was 96% lower. Push-up capacity even tracked the outcome more closely than a submaximal treadmill test did.

That's a striking result, and it deserves equally striking caveats. It's an association, not evidence that push-ups protect your heart. The cohort was occupationally active middle-aged men in one profession, and the authors say plainly that the findings may not generalize to women, to older or younger men, or to people who are less active. Men who can rip off 40 push-ups also tend to smoke less, weigh less and move more, and untangling those is beyond what one cohort can do.

The broader picture is more useful anyway. A 2022 systematic review of cohort studies found that muscle-strengthening activity was associated with roughly a 15% lower risk of all-cause mortality, with the biggest reduction showing up at around 30-60 minutes a week and no extra benefit from piling on much more. The WHO's guidance is in the same territory: adults should do muscle-strengthening activity involving all major muscle groups on two or more days a week. Push-ups are one convenient way to hit part of that, which is a better reason to train them than chasing a number on a chart.

05 What a good score doesn't mean

The test measures upper-body muscular endurance. That's it. It says nothing about your aerobic capacity, your legs, your mobility, your body composition, or your metabolic health, and it isn't a screening tool for anything. A friend who runs marathons may rate Fair on push-ups and be in far better shape than you overall.

A few other things skew the number in ways the chart can't see:

• Body weight. A heavier person is moving more load per rep. Two people with identical strength can be two categories apart.
• Limb length. Longer arms mean a longer range of motion and more work per rep. Not something you can train around.
• Recent training. If you benched heavy yesterday, today's test measures your recovery, not your capacity.
• Practice. Push-ups are a skill as well as a strength test. Some of your first few weeks of improvement is just getting better at the movement pattern.

None of that makes the test worthless. It makes it a single, cheap, repeatable data point - most valuable when you compare it against your own last score rather than a stranger's.

06 How to move up a category

The gap between categories is usually 4-8 reps. That's a realistic target for a six-week block if you train the movement deliberately instead of occasionally.

• Train 3-5 days a week in several short sets rather than one heroic effort. Push-ups recover fast enough for this at moderate volume.
• Work at 40-60% of your max per set. If your max is 20, do sets of 8-12. Stop each set a couple of reps before your form starts sliding - grinding to failure every session buys fatigue, not progress.
• Add one rep per set each week, or add a whole set. Small and boring beats big and unsustainable.
• Spread the volume out. Doing a set every hour or two across the day is one of the easiest ways to accumulate reps without a workout, which is the idea behind exercise snacks.
• Once your sets get long - past 20-25 reps - add difficulty instead of more reps. Slower tempo, a pause at the bottom, feet elevated. Otherwise you're training endurance and your max stops moving.

There's decent evidence that push-ups build real strength, not just stamina: in one 8-week study, a group training push-ups matched a group doing low-load bench press for gains in chest and triceps thickness and in bench press strength. You don't need equipment to get stronger at pushing.

If you'd rather not build the plan yourself, the free push-up challenge generator turns your current max and a goal into a printable, set-by-set schedule. For a ready-made target, 100 push-ups a day and the 1,000 push-up challenge both work well as a training block between tests.

07 If you can't do a full push-up yet

Scoring zero on a full push-up is common and it's a starting point, not a verdict. The way up is a ladder, and each rung is a real exercise:

1. Wall push-ups - standing, hands on a wall. The gentlest version there is.
2. Incline push-ups - hands on a kitchen counter, then a table, then a chair, then a low step. Lowering the surface is your progression dial, and it's a smoother one than jumping to knees.
3. Knee push-ups - keep a straight line from knees to head, with the same depth and lockout standards as a full rep.
4. Negatives - start at the top of a full push-up and take 3-5 seconds to lower yourself under control. Reset on your knees. This is often the fastest bridge to a first full rep.
5. Full push-ups - do singles at first, resting between them, and let the number grow.

Move to the next rung when you can do about 12-15 clean reps at the current one. The first push-up guide walks the whole ladder rung by rung. Getting there consistently matters more than getting there fast, which is mostly a question of building the habit rather than willpower.

08 How often to retest

Every four to six weeks. Not weekly, and definitely not daily.

A max test is genuinely fatiguing, and the number swings by several reps depending on sleep, food, stress and how recently you trained. Test too often and you're measuring noise while adding hard sessions that eat into your actual training. Test on a fixed schedule and you get a clean signal.

Keep the conditions the same each time so the comparison means something: same time of day, properly rested, same depth marker, same version of the movement. Log the score alongside the date. Over a year, four or five honest data points will tell you far more than fifty anxious ones.

09 Frequently asked questions

How many push-ups should I be able to do for my age?

Using the norms above, a man in his twenties needs about 22 to 28 push-ups to rate Good and 36 or more to rate Excellent, and those figures drop by roughly 5 reps per decade. A woman in her twenties needs about 15 to 20 modified push-ups for Good and 30 or more for Excellent. These are reference ranges from a healthy adult population, not a pass or fail line.

Is 20 push-ups good?

It depends on your age. Twenty clean standard push-ups rates Fair for a man in his twenties, Good for a man in his thirties, and Very good for a man in his forties or fifties. For most people 20 unbroken reps is a solid working base to build from rather than a ceiling.

How many push-ups can the average man do?

There is no single average, because it depends heavily on age and training history. The middle of the norms table lands somewhere around 22 to 28 reps for men in their twenties and 10 to 12 for men in their fifties. Anyone who has not trained pushing movements recently will usually come in below their age bracket, which is normal and fixable.

Do knee push-ups count on the push-up test?

In the standard protocol, yes for women and no for men. The published categories score men on full push-ups and women on modified knee push-ups, so a score only means what the chart says if you use the version the chart expects. If you are a woman testing on full push-ups, record it separately and compare it against yourself over time.

Is 40 push-ups good?

Forty unbroken full push-ups rates Excellent for men in every age bracket in the table. It is also the number from the 2019 firefighter study, where men who cleared 40 had far fewer cardiovascular events over the next decade than men who could not reach 10. That was an association in one specific group of men, so treat 40 as a strong fitness marker rather than a health guarantee.

How often should I retest my push-up max?

Every four to six weeks is plenty. A max test is fatiguing and the number bounces around day to day based on sleep, food and how recently you trained, so weekly testing mostly measures noise. Test under the same conditions each time: same time of day, rested, same depth marker.

How can I increase my push-up max?

Train push-ups three to five days a week in several short sets at roughly 40 to 60 percent of your max, stopping each set a couple of reps before form breaks down. Add one rep per set each week, or add a set. Most people see a meaningful jump in four to six weeks, though results vary.

Are push-ups a good measure of overall fitness?

They are a good measure of upper-body muscular endurance and a decent rough proxy for general conditioning, which is why the test is used so widely. They tell you nothing about your aerobic capacity, lower-body strength, mobility or body composition, so treat the score as one data point rather than a verdict on your fitness.