Benefits of Push Ups

By Sam

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Whether you’re a beginner or a regular weight lifter, there are many benefits from doing push ups. When you don’t have time to hit the gym or you’re not even a member of a gym, push ups can be an invaluable method of building and maintaining your strength.

Push ups work your entire upper body; this includes muscles such as your deltoids, lats, triceps, pectorals, biceps and abs.

Push ups are also a good source of cardiovascular exercise due to the high number of reps. Whilst doing push ups your heart rate will increase and raise your metabolism, allowing you to burn extra calories.

As well as that, push ups are a useful method of warming up and reduce the chances of straining a muscle during weight lifting. Lifting your own body weight will get your blood pumping throughout your muscles, making you ready for the heavier weights.

Do push ups build muscle?

One of the most common questions asked is whether push ups will actually build muscle or just tone. The answer depends on your current level of strength. 6-10 reps focuses on building muscle size, if you go over 12 reps it will be more towards toning.

If you’re a beginner and you can manage to do at most 10 push ups, you will notice improvements to the size of your muscle from just doing push ups. As you progressively manage to do a higher number of push ups in one go, you will notice more improvements to your tone.

While push ups may seem less useful if you’re already fairly strong and are able to do for example 40 push ups in one go, it is actually still very beneficial.

You shouldn’t ever let your body focus on one type of exercise as the rate at which you build muscle will decline. If you are trying to build muscle size and always do 6-10 reps for weight lifting exercises, your body will become too familiar with this range of repetitions.

You need to keep your body surprised and let it struggle to do various kinds of strength training, and push ups are a good way of mixing up your workouts.

So as well as push ups adding variety to your workouts (which helps to speed up your muscle gains), it will also help tone your muscle. The benefits of push ups should be enough to encourage anyone to start fitting more into their workouts.

Why not have a look at this simple push up workout.