How Many Push-Ups Should You Be Able to Do? Norms by Age and Sex

For a 30-to-39-year-old man, 22 to 29 consecutive full push-ups is the “good to very good” band on the reference chart most gyms and textbooks use. For a woman the same age, it’s 20 to 26 modified (knee) push-ups. Below 12 and 8 respectively is the “needs improvement” flag.

At 50, those bands drop by roughly half. At 20, they rise by about a third.

That’s the answer most people want, and the full chart is two sections down. But two things about it are worth knowing before you measure yourself against it.

The first is that the chart is older and thinner than its authority suggests — it traces to a 2003 Canadian assessment manual whose underlying sample is not publicly documented.¹ The second is that the famous finding people cite alongside it — the Harvard study where 40 push-ups predicted a 96% lower cardiovascular event rate — came from 1,104 male firefighters and 37 total events, with a confidence interval so wide the true effect could be anywhere from “enormous” to “moderate.”²

Both things can be true: the number is genuinely informative, and the chart you’re comparing it against is a rough instrument. A single rep count is a snapshot. What it means depends on your age, your sex, your test protocol, and — most of all — where the same number sat six months ago. Tracking that trajectory instead of the snapshot is exactly what SensAI was built to do.

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

Push-up capacity is a muscular endurance test, not a strength test. You are not lifting a maximum load; you are repeating a submaximal one until the muscle can no longer produce force at the required rate. A standard push-up loads roughly 60–70% of bodyweight through the arms and chest, which is why the number lands in the tens rather than the ones.

The most widely reproduced reference standards come from the Canadian Physical Activity, Fitness & Lifestyle Approach (CPAFLA), reprinted in ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription.¹ They are the tables behind almost every push-up calculator on the internet, usually without attribution.

Push-up norms for men (full push-ups, to exhaustion):

Age	Excellent	Very good	Good	Fair	Needs improvement
20–29	≥36	29–35	22–28	17–21	≤16
30–39	≥30	22–29	17–21	12–16	≤11
40–49	≥25	17–24	13–16	10–12	≤9
50–59	≥21	13–20	10–12	7–9	≤6
60–69	≥18	11–17	8–10	5–7	≤4

Push-up norms for women (modified/knee push-ups, to exhaustion):

Age	Excellent	Very good	Good	Fair	Needs improvement
20–29	≥30	21–29	15–20	10–14	≤9
30–39	≥27	20–26	13–19	8–12	≤7
40–49	≥24	15–23	11–14	5–10	≤4
50–59	≥21	11–20	7–10	2–6	≤1
60–69	≥17	12–16	5–11	2–4	≤1

Two structural details people miss constantly:

The two tables are not the same test. The men’s column is full push-ups from the toes. The women’s column is the modified knee position, which removes roughly 20 percentage points of bodyweight load. A woman doing 25 full push-ups is not “average for her age” — she is off the chart, because the chart never measured that.

The tier labels vary by source. The original manual uses Excellent / Very good / Good / Fair / Needs improvement. Many reprints relabel the same five columns Excellent / Good / Average / Below average / Poor. Identical numbers, different words — which is why one calculator calls your 24 push-ups “good” and the next calls them “average.”

Where does the push-up chart actually come from?

This is the part almost nobody publishing these tables will tell you: the provenance is weak.

The numbers descend from the CPAFLA manual published by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology in 2003, later carried into ACSM’s guidelines.¹ The sample that produced the percentile cut-points — how many people, from where, tested by whom — is not documented in the sources that reproduce it. Independent fitness-science reviewers who have tried to trace it say the same thing.

That does not make the chart useless. It makes it a reference band, not a population percentile. Treat “good for a 40-year-old man” as a plausible target, not as a measured statement about the 60th percentile of 40-year-old men.

For a genuinely traceable population dataset, the best recent work is Brazilian. Eduardo Marins and colleagues, including Jay Dawes of Oklahoma State University’s Tactical Fitness and Nutrition Lab, built age- and sex-based normative tables from 8,628 Brazilian Federal Highway Police officers aged 21 to 70, using a 60-second push-up test, and published percentile curves from the 10th through the 90th.³

Two findings from that dataset are worth carrying into how you read any push-up chart:

• Performance declined across every age category in both sexes, with large effect sizes — the age gradient in the CPAFLA table is real, not an artifact.³ An earlier analysis of 383 Colorado State Patrol officers by Robert Lockie and Dawes found the same direction, with female officers in their twenties significantly out-performing the 30–39 and 40–49 groups on the push-up test.⁴
• Men and women differed significantly on cardiorespiratory fitness, abdominal endurance, and lower-limb power — but not on upper-limb endurance (p > 0.05, d = 0.05).³

That second result is the surprising one. In a population where both sexes performed the same 60-second push-up test under the same conditions, the sex difference in push-up count was negligible. It suggests a good deal of the gap encoded in the traditional two-table chart reflects the two different protocols and different training histories, not a fixed physiological ceiling.

Is 40 push-ups really the magic number?

You have probably seen the headline: men who could do more than 40 push-ups had a 96% lower risk of cardiovascular events.

The study is real and it is good. Justin Yang, Stefanos N. Kales, and colleagues at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed 1,104 active male firefighters (mean age 39.6) for 10 years after a baseline push-up test, stratified into five capacity groups. Compared with men who managed fewer than 10 push-ups, those completing more than 40 had an incidence rate ratio of 0.04 (95% CI, 0.01–0.36) for cardiovascular events, adjusted for age and BMI.²

Now the honest reading of that number.

What the study showed	What it did not show
A strong graded association across five push-up categories	That doing push-ups causes the risk reduction
37 CVD events across 8,601 person-years	A large enough event count for a precise estimate
A 95% CI of 0.01–0.36	A settled effect size — that interval spans an order of magnitude
Findings in active adult male firefighters	Anything measured in women, or in sedentary populations

The authors say this plainly in their own conclusion: larger studies in more diverse cohorts are needed, and push-up capacity “may be a simple, no-cost measure to estimate functional status.”² Functional status — not a treatment.

So 40 is not a threshold your arteries recognize. It is the top bin of a five-bin split in one occupational cohort. What survives scrutiny is the direction and the gradient: more push-ups tracked with fewer events, monotonically, at every step.

Does push-up capacity actually predict health outcomes?

Push-ups sit inside a much larger and much better-powered literature on muscular fitness and mortality. That literature is consistent, and it is more nuanced than the headlines.

Muscular strength predicts mortality independent of cardio fitness. Jonatan Ruiz, Steven N. Blair, and colleagues followed 8,762 men aged 20–80 in the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study for an average of 18.9 years. Age-adjusted all-cause death rates fell from 38.9 per 10,000 person-years in the weakest third to 25.9 and 26.6 in the middle and strongest thirds. The association with all-cause and cancer mortality held after adjusting for cardiorespiratory fitness — though the cardiovascular-specific association attenuated.⁵

The dose is small. Haruki Momma and colleagues meta-analysed 16 prospective cohorts and found muscle-strengthening activity associated with 10–17% lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, total cancer, and diabetes — with maximum benefit at roughly 30–60 minutes per week, and a J-shaped curve beyond that.⁶ Half an hour a week is the shape of the evidence.

Weak grip is a mortality signal across 17 countries. Darryl Leong and the PURE investigators measured grip strength in 139,691 adults and found each 5 kg reduction associated with a 16% higher all-cause mortality hazard (HR 1.16, 95% CI 1.13–1.20) and 17% higher cardiovascular mortality.⁷ Their later reference-range paper, drawing on 125,462 healthy adults across 21 countries, showed something important for chart-reading generally: normative strength values differ substantially by geographic region and ethnicity, from a median 50 kg in European/North American men under 40 to 18 kg in South East Asian women over 60.⁸ A single global table misreads a lot of people.

In patients, the signal is even sharper. Carmen Jochem and colleagues pooled 39 studies and 39,852 participants with chronic disease and found lowest-versus-highest muscular strength carried an 80% higher all-cause mortality risk (HR 1.80, 95% CI 1.54–2.10).⁹

And now the counterweight, which matters because it involves push-ups specifically. Kun-Zhe Tsai, Carl J. Lavie, and colleagues followed 2,890 military men and women aged 18–39 in Taiwan for a median 5.8 years, measuring muscular endurance as 2-minute push-up count. Cardiorespiratory fitness predicted incident metabolic syndrome. Push-up capacity, on its own, did not — the protective effect was mainly driven by aerobic fitness. Only in combination did it add: high-CRF/high-push-up carried a hazard ratio of 0.553 versus low/low, against 0.730 for high-CRF/low-push-up.¹⁰

The same research group found push-up count positively associated with FEV1 in 1,227 physically active young adults, where sit-up count showed no such association.¹¹

Put together, the honest summary is this: push-up capacity is a useful, cheap, repeatable marker of muscular fitness — and muscular fitness genuinely predicts outcomes — but push-ups are not a substitute for cardio, and no single rep count diagnoses anything.

How to run the push-up test properly

If you are going to compare yourself to a chart, run the protocol the chart assumes. Most people inflate their number by 20–40% through partial range and a sagging hip.

1. Position. Men and anyone testing the standard version: toes, hands roughly shoulder-width, body rigid from ankles to head. Modified version: knees on a mat, hands beside the chest, back straight, same rigid line from knees to head.
2. The rep. Lower until your chest nears the floor and your elbows reach approximately 90°. Return to full arm extension. That is one rep.
3. The tempo. Continuous and controlled. No pausing in the top position to recover.
4. The stop. To exhaustion — not to a time limit and not to a target. The test ends when you cannot complete another rep in the required form, or when the hips break the straight line.
5. The conditions. Not after a chest workout, not after a long run. Same time of day, same warm-up, every time you retest.

Rule 5 is the one that actually determines whether the number is worth anything. A push-up count taken cold on a Tuesday morning and one taken after Saturday’s bench session are not comparable data points, and neither is worth plotting.

Note the protocol difference in the research literature too: CPAFLA uses to-exhaustion, the Brazilian police study used 60 seconds, and the Taiwanese military cohorts used 2 minutes.³¹⁰¹¹ Timed tests cap high performers and reward pacing. Do not compare a 60-second score to a to-exhaustion chart.

For SensAI users, this is the piece the app handles: it stores the protocol alongside the result, so a retest is compared against a like-for-like baseline rather than against whatever conditions produced the last number.

How fast can you improve your push-up number?

Faster than most people expect, and the mechanism is partly neural rather than muscular — early gains come from coordination and rate of force development, not new tissue.

The training question is dose. Gordon Ralston and colleagues meta-analysed weekly set volume across 61 treatment groups and found higher weekly sets produced greater strength gains than low weekly sets (ES 0.18, 95% CI 0.06–0.30), with medium volume also beating low.¹² The effect is real but modest — the difference between doing something and doing nothing dwarfs the difference between moderate and high volume.

For push-ups specifically, the practical structure that works:

If your current max is	Train with	Frequency
0–5	Incline or knee push-ups, 3–4 sets of 8–12	3×/week
6–15	Full push-ups, 4 sets stopping 2 reps short of failure	3×/week
16–30	Mixed: full sets plus a weighted or decline variation	2–3×/week
30+	Load the movement — the endurance test is no longer the bottleneck	2×/week

If you are at zero, our step-by-step push-up progression covers the wall-to-floor sequence in detail. If you are past 30 and want to know what “strong” looks like on loaded pressing, the strength standards by bodyweight, sex and age chart gives the bench press equivalents, and our bench press technique guide covers the transfer.

Expect a plateau around week 6–8. That is normal, and it is where most people quit rather than change the stimulus.

Where the push-up test fits among other home fitness tests

Push-up capacity is one of four field tests you can run without equipment or a lab, and each measures something different:

Test	What it measures	Strongest evidence
Push-up capacity	Upper-body muscular endurance	CVD events in male firefighters2
Grip strength	Whole-body strength proxy	All-cause and CV mortality across 17 countries7
1-minute heart rate recovery	Autonomic/parasympathetic function	Cardiovascular mortality
Resting heart rate	Baseline cardiac efficiency	Broad cardiovascular risk

Run all four and you have a fuller picture than any one gives you. Our guides to the grip strength test and its longevity evidence, heart rate recovery after exercise, and resting heart rate by age cover the protocols and norms for the other three.

None of them is a diagnosis. All of them are trends worth watching.

How SensAI reads your push-up number

A rep count in a notes app is a number. A rep count in context is information.

SensAI treats a push-up test the way a coach would: it records the protocol and the conditions, compares the result against your own history rather than only against a population band, and factors your upper-body pressing volume from the preceding weeks into how the result gets interpreted. A drop from 28 to 22 after a heavy pressing block is expected. The same drop during a deload is a signal.

It also handles the thing the charts cannot: progressive overload that responds to what actually happened. If your last three pressing sessions were harder than programmed, the next one adjusts. If your push-up retest came in flat for the second month running, the volume prescription changes rather than repeating.

The chart tells you where you stand against a 2003 Canadian reference sample. SensAI tells you where you stand against yourself last quarter, which is the comparison that determines what to do on Monday.

Frequently asked questions

How many push-ups should the average man be able to do?

For a man aged 30–39, 17–21 full push-ups is the “good” band and 22–29 is “very good” on the standard reference chart.¹ At 20–29 those bands are 22–28 and 29–35; at 40–49 they are 13–16 and 17–24.

How many push-ups should a woman be able to do?

On the modified (knee) test the chart assumes, a woman aged 30–39 in the “good” band does 13–19 reps, and 20–26 is “very good.”¹ Note that the women’s norms were never established for full push-ups from the toes — a woman doing full push-ups is performing a harder test than the chart measures.

Is 20 push-ups good?

For a man under 30, 20 is in the “fair” band — below average for that age. For a man over 50 it is “very good.” For a woman on the modified test it is “very good” at almost any adult age.¹ Age and protocol change the answer completely, which is why a single threshold is useless.

Is 30 push-ups good?

Thirty full push-ups is “excellent” for a man aged 30 or older, and “very good” for a man in his twenties.¹ It also places you in the second-highest bin of the Harvard firefighter cohort, where every step up in push-up capacity tracked with fewer cardiovascular events.²

Does 40 push-ups really cut heart disease risk by 96%?

That figure comes from one study of 1,104 male firefighters with 37 total cardiovascular events, and its 95% confidence interval runs from 0.01 to 0.36 — a very wide range.² The graded association is credible; the precise 96% is not a number to bank on, and the study was not designed to show causation.

How many push-ups can the average 50-year-old do?

The reference chart puts 10–12 full push-ups in the “good” band for men aged 50–59, and 7–10 modified push-ups for women in that range.¹ Population data from 8,628 police officers aged 21–70 confirms a real, consistent decline across age categories in both sexes.³

Should women do knee push-ups for the test?

Only if you are comparing to the women’s column of the standard chart, which was built on the modified position. If you can do full push-ups, do the full test and compare to the men’s table or, better, to your own previous result. The largest recent dataset found no significant sex difference in upper-limb endurance when men and women ran the same protocol.³

Do push-ups improve cardiovascular fitness?

Not meaningfully on their own. In 2,890 young adults followed for a median 5.8 years, push-up capacity alone did not predict incident metabolic syndrome once cardiorespiratory fitness was accounted for — though it added to the protection when both were high.¹⁰ Push-ups build muscular endurance. Running, cycling, and rowing build cardiorespiratory fitness. You need both.

How often should I retest?

Every 8–12 weeks, under identical conditions. More often than that and you are measuring day-to-day noise; less often and you lose the ability to tell a training response from drift.

Can push-ups replace strength training?

They cover horizontal pressing and little else. The mortality evidence is about muscular strength broadly, not push-ups specifically,⁵⁹ and 30–60 minutes per week of muscle-strengthening activity across the whole body is where the outcome data concentrates.⁶

The bottom line

The chart is a reasonable target, not a verdict. A 30-something man in the 22–29 range and a 30-something woman in the 20–26 range on the modified test are both sitting comfortably in “very good” — against a reference sample whose origins are, honestly, hard to trace.¹

The evidence underneath it is stronger than the chart itself. More push-ups tracked with fewer cardiovascular events across five capacity bins in 1,104 firefighters.² Greater muscular strength predicted lower all-cause mortality across 8,762 men over nearly 19 years, independent of cardio fitness.⁵ Thirty to sixty minutes a week of strength work is where the benefit concentrates.⁶

So run the test properly once — full range, to exhaustion, cold. Write down the number and the protocol. Train three times a week. Retest in ten weeks under exactly the same conditions.

The second number is the one that means something. The first was just a starting line.

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References

Footnotes

1. American College of Sports Medicine. ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription, 11th edition. Wolters Kluwer, 2022. Push-up norms reproduced from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, Canadian Physical Activity, Fitness & Lifestyle Approach (CPAFLA), 3rd edition, 2003. https://www.acsm.org/education-resources/books/guidelines-exercise-testing-prescription ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Yang J, Christophi CA, Farioli A, Baur DM, Moffatt S, Zollinger TW, Kales SN. “Association Between Push-up Exercise Capacity and Future Cardiovascular Events Among Active Adult Men.” JAMA Network Open, 2019;2(2):e188341. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30768197/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. Marins EF, de Araújo Rocha Junior V, Castagna de Freitas F, Rossy e Vasconcelos Júnior J, Aparecido Minervi N, Dawes JJ, Boscolo Del Vecchio F. “Unraveling the Boundaries of Police Physical Fitness: Normative Values of Police Physical Fitness Based on a Representative Sample of 8,000 Federal Highway Police Officers Aged 21-70 Years From Brazil.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2025;39(2):260-268. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39590513/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Lockie RG, Dawes JJ, Kornhauser CL, Holmes RJ. “Cross-Sectional and Retrospective Cohort Analysis of the Effects of Age on Flexibility, Strength Endurance, Lower-Body Power, and Aerobic Fitness in Law Enforcement Officers.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2019;33(2):451-458. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28445229/ ↩

5. Ruiz JR, Sui X, Lobelo F, Morrow JR Jr, Jackson AW, Sjöström M, Blair SN. “Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study.” BMJ, 2008;337:a439. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18595904/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Momma H, Kawakami R, Honda T, Sawada SS. “Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2022;56(13):755-763. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35228201/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, Lopez-Jaramillo P, Avezum A Jr, Orlandini A, Seron P, Ahmed SH, Rosengren A, Kelishadi R, Rahman O, Swaminathan S, Iqbal R, Gupta R, Lear SA, Oguz A, Yusoff K, Zatonska K, Chifamba J, Igumbor E, Mohan V, Anjana RM, Gu H, Li W, Yusuf S. “Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study.” The Lancet, 2015;386(9990):266-273. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982160/ ↩ ↩²

8. Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, Kutty VR, Lanas F, Hui C, Quanyong X, Zhenzhen Q, Jinhua T, Noorhassim I, AlHabib KF, Moss SJ, Rosengren A, Akalin AA, Rahman O, Chifamba J, Orlandini A, Kumar R, Yeates K, Gupta R, Yusufali A, Dans A, Avezum Á, Lopez-Jaramillo P, Poirier P, Heidari H, Zatonska K, Iqbal R, Khatib R, Yusuf S. “Reference ranges of handgrip strength from 125,462 healthy adults in 21 countries: a prospective urban rural epidemiologic (PURE) study.” Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 2016;7(5):535-546. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27104109/ ↩

9. Jochem C, Leitzmann M, Volaklis K, Aune D, Strasser B. “Association Between Muscular Strength and Mortality in Clinical Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 2019;20(10):1213-1223. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31331825/ ↩ ↩²

10. Tsai KZ, Chu CC, Huang WC, Sui X, Lavie CJ, Lin GM. “The combined effect of cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness on the incidence of metabolic syndrome before midlife.” Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 2024;15(4):1483-1490. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38845599/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Liu CH, Lin YC, Huang WC, Sui X, Lavie CJ, Lin GM. “Associations of Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Muscular Endurance Fitness With Pulmonary Function in Physically Active Young Adults.” Archivos de Bronconeumología, 2025;61(1):5-12. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39013727/ ↩ ↩²

12. Ralston GW, Kilgore L, Wyatt FB, Baker JS. “The Effect of Weekly Set Volume on Strength Gain: A Meta-Analysis.” Sports Medicine, 2017;47(12):2585-2601. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28755103/ ↩