How to Do More Press-Ups

From your first strict rep to 40+ on a 2-minute test - the mechanism, the protocols, the form errors that cap progress, and the programming that actually moves the number.

The press-up is one of the most universal tests in physical preparation. It sits in the British Army's Soldier Conditioning Assessment, the Royal Marines Candidate Preparation Course, P Company prep, every infantry phase course, and forms some part of almost every Special Forces selection assessment.

And it's one of the most consistently under-trained or misunderstood movements in tactical-athlete preparation.

Most candidates assume press-ups will improve as a byproduct of general training but like anything else - they don't. Press-ups are a specific skill with specific loading demands, and they respond to specific training. The candidate who shows up to a 2-minute test having done a few sets at the end of a gym session twice a week is rarely the candidate who hits the standard.

This article covers the mechanism behind why press-ups are harder to improve than people think, the errors that cap most progress, the prerequisites that build the platform, the protocols that work for true beginners through to 40+ rep performers, when to add weighted variations, and the common mistakes that hold back serious athletes.

Why are press-ups so hard to improve?

Most people overestimate how much press-up performance improves as a byproduct of general training. It rarely does.

The bench press, popular as it is, develops the relevant pressing muscles but doesn't transfer as well on its own to the press-up. A study by Calatayud et al. (2014) demonstrated that the press-up activates the rectus abdominis, external obliques, and serratus anterior at significantly higher levels than the bench press at equivalent relative loads. The press-up is a closed-chain, full-body integration movement. The bench press is an open-chain isolation-style movement. They share muscles; they don't share patterns.

How hard press-ups are for you comes down to:

• Strength relative to bodyweight. A press-up moves approximately 60-70% of bodyweight depending on stance and arm length. Heavier soldiers need more absolute pressing strength to match the rep count of lighter athletes with comparable relative strength.

• Trunk and posterior chain integration. A press-up that drops at the hips, sags at the lower back, or breaks at the knees is leaking force. The trunk, glutes, and quads have to remain rigid for the press to be efficient. Most failures on a 2-minute test happen not because the chest gives up but because the core does.

• Tissue tolerance. Wrist, shoulder, and elbow connective tissue need exposure to the press-up pattern before they tolerate high volume. Soldiers ramping rep counts too quickly often develop wrist or anterior shoulder pain that compounds the press-up problem rather than solving it.

Work out which of those is yours and you stop "just trying harder" and start training the limiter.

Why can't I do more press-ups?

Nearly all the stalled press-up training we see in consultations comes back to specificity and structure.

Specificity - Candidates spend most of their pushing volume on bench press, dumbbell press, dips and other gym-pressing variants, on the assumption that any pressing work will transfer to press-ups. It transfers partially, not fully. The body adapts to the specific demand placed on it. If you want more press-ups, you have to do press-ups, often, in a structured way.

Structure - Sessions are unplanned. Reps are scattered across the week. There is no progression model. One session is three sets to failure. The next is six quick sets of three or something thrown into a metcon. The week after, no press-ups at all. The body cannot adapt to a moving target. Without a deliberate weekly volume that progresses over time, improvement is largely accidental.

Fix specificity and structure, and most people add 8-15 reps to their 2-minute test in eight to twelve weeks easily enoug. Ignore both and you can train hard for a year and gain nothing.

What does the press-up actually require?

Anatomically, a press-up requires:

• Pressing strength from the pectoralis major, anterior deltoid and triceps.

• Scapular protraction and stability from the serratus anterior.

• Trunk rigidity from the rectus abdominis, obliques, and erector spinae.

• Glute and quad isometric engagement to keep the body in a straight line.

• Wrist, elbow and shoulder tendon tolerance to repeated loading.

A failing press-up is rarely a failure of the pressing muscles alone. It's usually a chain failure - one link in the kinetic chain breaks first and the whole rep collapses. This is why isolated bench press training, while useful for chest development, doesn't translate cleanly to press-up performance.

The press-up standard - and why it matters which test you're training for

The British Army's Soldier Conditioning Assessment measures press-ups across a 2-minute window, with performance scored into four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold and the SCA 100 Club. Full range, chest descending to within an inch or two of the floor, arms locking out at the top. The Royal Marines and Royal Navy use variations of the same standard maybe with some stricter hand placement or to a metronome. The Parachute Regiment and various selection-feeder courses use similar metrics with slightly different range-of-motion requirements.

Which (due to specificity) changes how you train for it somewhat.

Train to the standard of the test you're being assessed against. A candidate hitting a clean 50 reps with a 90-degree elbow bend will hit fewer reps under a chest-to-floor standard or a hand release version. Practise the actual standard regularly enough that your nervous system is calibrated to it.

The test is also a muscular endurance test inside a strength-dominated movement pattern. Most candidates need to develop the underlying pressing strength, so that each rep costs less relative to maximum, and the muscular endurance, so that the rep cap isn't reached prematurely. Train both.

Build the platform first

Before chasing rep numbers, build the foundation. The drills below belong in the first six weeks of any structured press-up work, and most people skip them.

The hollow body / plank position

A press-up is essentially a moving plank. If your plank position is weak - sagging hips, lifted bum, hyperextended lumbar spine - your press-up will inherit those compensations and reach a low ceiling fast.

Build to 90-120 seconds of accumulated plank in proper position. Ribs down. Glutes squeezed. Toes pressed into the floor. Body in a straight line from head to heel. This is the position every press-up rep should hold throughout.

Scapular push-ups

From the top of a press-up position, allow your shoulder blades to retract (sink between the body) without bending the elbows, then protract (push apart). The body moves an inch or two. Trains the serratus anterior and the scapular control that prevents shoulder issues at higher volumes.

Aim for sets of 8-10 quality reps. 2-3 sets per session. Daily to really push this endurance up.

The slow eccentric press-up

Start at the top of a press-up. Lower under control over 4-5 seconds to a chest-to-floor position. Then reset (knees down or step back up) and repeat. The body produces around 1.3-1.6 times more force eccentrically than concentrically. The slow descent loads the pressing muscles, builds strength specifically in the bottom range of the rep, and conditions the connective tissue to handle volume.

Aim for sets of 5-10 controlled negatives and even with pauses at the bottom to accumulate fatigue in your shoulders and arms. Critical for beginners and still very useful even for advanced trainees as a tempo accessory.

How to build your first press-ups - the zero-to-twenty progression

The path from a low amount of strict press-ups or just scrappy reps, to twenty solid unbroken takes most people 12-16 weeks of structured work. The path from twenty to forty takes another 8-12 weeks beyond that. There isn't a shortcut that doesn't cost you more in injury than it saves you in time.

Table 1. A 16-week structured build from no strict press-ups to a 40+ rep 2-minute test, assuming three to five sessions per week.

Volume should climb gradually. Cap weekly press-up volume increases at 10-15% to avoid wrist and shoulder overuse. The stimulus also needs to change every 2-4 weeks, because the same protocol run session after session produces stagnation or diminishing returns.

How to break the stall around twenty or thirty reps

For most candidates stuck around 20-30 reps on a 2-minute test, the problem isn't always pressing strength. It's volume strategy and form drift under fatigue.

Practical guidance for this bracket:

• Cap reps per set at 50-60% of your max. If your max is 30, work in sets of 15-18. Multiple high-quality sets beat one heroic max effort for total weekly volume.

• Train pushing 3-5 times per week. Press-ups, like any neurological skill, respond to frequency. Distribute the work across several sessions rather than concentrating it.

• Target 100-200 quality reps per week. That's the bracket where most progress happens for someone going from 20 to 40. Below 100 reps weekly, adaptation is slow. Above 200, returns diminish and injury risk rises.

• Practise the actual test occasionally - not constantly. Once every 2-3 weeks, do a full 2-minute maximal test under the standard you're training for. This calibrates pacing and provides a benchmark. Doing it weekly creates fatigue without adaptation.

Sample press-up workouts that actually work

The session formats below all work. Pick one or two per week and stay on them for at least four weeks before changing.

Table 2. Session formats for press-up development. The right format depends on where you are in the build and what needs developing.

Greasing the Groove (GTG), the protocol - popularised by Pavel Tsatsouline - instructs the trainee to perform sub-maximal sets of a movement throughout the day, every day, never to failure. The premise is that skill (and the neural patterns underlying strength) responds to high frequency with low fatigue. For pull-ups and press-ups specifically, GTG works exceptionally well because the movement is low-cost, performable anywhere, and benefits significantly from skill rehearsal. Five-ten reps every 90 minutes across a working day produces 40-100 quality reps daily - without ever fatiguing the system.

How to programme press-ups into a wider training week

Press-ups sit alongside lower-body strength, aerobic work, and load carriage as a target inside a broader programme. The mistake to avoid is treating them as either the only thing being trained or as an afterthought tacked on at the end of fatigued sessions.

Table 3. Sample weekly distribution combining press-up frequency with broader strength and conditioning work. The total weekly press-up volume sits around 150-180 quality reps across six exposure points.

Frequency drives adaptation. The wrists and elbows tolerate near-daily exposure and actually gain more mobility from that, provided no single session is brutal. A short EMOM, a couple of GTG sessions, a quick ladder, and a sub-max post-session pop - distributed across the week - outperform a single big rep hammer session.

When to add weighted press-ups

Once a candidate can produce 50+ unbroken strict press-ups, the bodyweight press-up starts to under-stimulate the pressing muscles. At this point, weighted variations become the most efficient way to keep building. You can start with weighted press-ups earlier but your form needs to be rock solid to truly benefit from them.

Practical loading options:

• Weight vest - easiest to use, most accessible, allows for full range of motion. Start with 5-10kg added.

• Chains across the upper back - favoured by some military programmes, adds load that scales with range of motion.

• Partner-applied resistance - a training partner placing controlled hands or light load on the upper back during sets.

• Elevated feet - increases the relative bodyweight pressed, around 75% at 30cm of foot elevation versus 60-70% on the floor.

Reps drop into the 5-10 range with weighted variations. Maintain bodyweight press-up volume on a separate session for test-specific endurance. A candidate hitting 50 unbroken bodyweight and 10 clean reps with 10kg of added load is operationally well-placed for almost any UK military pressing standard.

What are the common mistakes that stop press-ups improving?

The errors below cap progress without ever announcing themselves, and they catch experienced athletes as often as beginners.

Form drift under fatigue. Reps on a 2-minute test deteriorate fastest around the 60-80 second mark. Hips sag. Range of motion shortens. Reps stop being valid. The fix is to train the back end of the test deliberately - practise holding form when you're fatigued, because that's the state the reps actually count in.

Always to failure. Failure work has a place once every 2-3 weeks at most. Done every session, it interferes with recovery, capping weekly volume and slowing adaptation. Sub-max work, repeated frequently, builds the muscular endurance the test requires.

Always doing bench press over training press-ups. Bench press has its place for upper-body pressing strength. It does not transfer 'fully' to the press-up. If your test is press-ups, your training has to have press-ups in it.

Wrist neglect. High-volume press-up training without wrist conditioning leads to wrist pain that derails the build. Spend 2 minutes at the start of each pressing session on wrist circles, palm-down stretching, and gentle loading.

Switching protocols every fortnight. The protocol that works is the one you stick with for 8-12 weeks. Most stalls aren't because the programme was wrong. They're because the programme was abandoned before it could produce adaptation.

Bottom line

The soldier who builds a strong press-up score isn't the one who hammers maximum sets every session. It's the one who trains the movement three to five times a week, accumulates sub-max volume, builds the platform first, respects tendon timelines, and stays on the same plan long enough for the body to respond.

What to take into your week:

• Build the platform first. Hollow body, scap push-ups, slow eccentrics. The foundation pays back later.

• Train frequency, not heroism. Sub-maximal sets, multiple times per week, beat occasional maximum efforts every time. 100-200 quality reps weekly is the productive range for most builds.

• Stay on the plan. The body needs 10-16 weeks of consistent stimulus before it pays back. Most people don't get the back end of that window.

Press-ups reward patience and punish hesitation. Get the structure right and the number moves.

Press-up training: frequently asked questions

How do I do more press-ups quickly?

There's no quick route, but the highest-leverage interventions in the first 4-6 weeks are: increase weekly press-up volume to 100-200 quality reps distributed across 3-5 sessions; cap individual sets at sub-maximal (50-60% of current max); add the Greasing the Groove protocol if your schedule allows; and stay on it without programme-hopping. Most people add 5-10 reps to their 2-minute test inside 6 weeks of doing this well.

Why do my press-ups stall around 20 reps?

Stalls around 20 reps are almost always volume strategy problems, not strength problems. Most people in this bracket are doing 2-3 sets to failure twice a week and capping their weekly volume at around 60 reps. The body adapts to the average weekly load, not the heroic single set. Dropping intensity per set and raising weekly frequency typically breaks the stall within 4-8 weeks.

Should I do press-ups every day?

Sub-maximal press-up work - Greasing the Groove style - yes, daily exposure is well tolerated for most people and accelerates progress. Maximal sets to failure should not be daily. The constraint is recovery of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder connective tissue, not the pressing muscles. High frequency with controlled intensity beats low frequency with maximum intensity for press-up development.

What's a good number of press-ups for the British Army?

The Soldier Conditioning Assessment scores press-ups over a 2-minute window into four tiers. For a male under 30 the standards are 21 for Bronze, 28 for Silver, 32 for Gold and 52 for the SCA 100 Club. Standards scale across age groups and differ for female soldiers. Selection-feeder courses and UKSF assessments sit above the 100 Club figure. Train to the specific standard of the test you're being assessed against rather than to a general number.

How do I do hand-release press-ups?

From the bottom of a press-up with chest on the floor, lift both hands a couple of inches off the ground briefly, then return them and press up. The hand release ensures full range of motion at the bottom - no bouncing, no partial reps. It's used in the US ACFT and increasingly in UK selection variants. The technique reduces top-end rep count significantly (typically by 20-30%) because it removes the elastic energy return from the chest's contact with the floor.

Wide grip vs narrow grip press-ups - which is better?

Both have a place. Standard grip (hands roughly shoulder-width) is the test standard and should be the dominant training position. Wide grip emphasises the chest and front delt. Narrow grip (diamond / triceps press-ups) emphasises the triceps and is harder per rep. Training all three through a build provides variety, reduces overuse risk on any single pattern, and builds rounded pressing strength.

Does bench press carry over to press-ups?

Partially. Bench press develops the pressing muscles, which contributes to press-up performance. But the press-up is a closed-chain integration movement involving the trunk, glutes, and scapular control, and bench press doesn't train those elements. Research (Calatayud et al., 2014) shows press-ups produce significantly higher activation of the rectus abdominis, obliques, and serratus anterior than bench press at equivalent relative loads. If your goal is press-up performance, do press-ups. Use bench press as accessory work for general pressing strength.

Can I get bigger doing only press-ups?

To a point. Bodyweight press-ups will produce meaningful chest, shoulder, and triceps hypertrophy for beginners and lower-intermediate trainees, especially with high frequency and progressive volume. The ceiling arrives when bodyweight is no longer enough stimulus to drive further adaptation - usually around the 30-50 unbroken rep range. Beyond that, weighted variations or external load are needed for continued hypertrophy.

Why do I get wrist pain from press-ups?

High-volume press-up work without progressive tissue conditioning is the most common cause. The wrist is being asked to extend to roughly 90 degrees and load the ulnar side under fatigue, repeatedly. Warm the wrists before sessions with circles, palm presses and gentle loading. Use parallettes or hex-shape press-up handles to reduce wrist extension. And build volume gradually, capping weekly increases at 10-15%.

How long does it take to go from 0 to 20 press-ups?

For most beginners following a structured plan, 12-16 weeks of consistent training (3-5 sessions per week) produces a strict 20-rep unbroken set. Faster timelines (under 8 weeks) usually come at the cost of tendon and wrist tolerance, leading to injuries that interrupt training. The deliberately slow progression in the table above respects the connective tissue timelines that ultimately determine how durable your press-up is.

References

Calatayud, J., Borreani, S., Colado, J. C., Martin, F., & Rogers, M. E. (2014). Muscle activation during push-ups with different suspension training systems. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 13(3), 502-510.

Tsatsouline, P. (2000). Power to the People: Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American. Dragon Door.

Schoenfeld, B. J., Grgic, J., Van Every, D. W., & Plotkin, D. L. (2021). Loading recommendations for muscle strength, hypertrophy, and local endurance: a re-examination of the repetition continuum. Sports, 9(2), 32.

Borges, N. R., & Driller, M. W. (2019). The push-up exercise: a systematic review with potential application for assessing upper-extremity muscle strength and endurance. International Journal of Exercise Science, 12(6), 825-839.

The Stoic Conditioning app builds press-up frequency and progressive pushing volume into every operational programme alongside strength and conditioning work. The 7-day trial gives you full access - link on our main page.