Are push-ups strength training?

In the context of regular fitness, push-ups certainly belong to strength training, but this issue has always been a bit controversial. The essence is that people at different training stages have different understandings of the "stimulation threshold of strength training."

Last week I took a student who had just graduated from high school. He had a high body fat of 180 pounds and had no foundation in exercise before. When he tried standard push-ups for the first time, he couldn't hold it up until he hit the mat halfway down. In the end, he had to start with kneeling push-ups. After doing 6 push-ups in each group, his arms were shaking from exhaustion. The next day after the training, his chest and triceps were so sore that he couldn't lift them up. The push-ups at that time were a real resistance training for him - after all, the resistance was his own body weight, and the intensity completely matched his current strength level. After three weeks of training, when he could do 10 standard push-ups, the bench press weight also increased from 20kg to 35kg on the empty bar, and the effect of increasing strength was real.

As for many fitness enthusiasts who have been practicing for two or three years, they will say that "push-ups are not strength training, they are just a warm-up exercise." In fact, it is not unreasonable. For veterans who can bench press 1.5 times their own body weight and can do fifty or sixty standard push-ups in one breath, the resistance of body-weight push-ups is indeed too low and cannot reach the "6 to 12RM" load intensity required to develop maximum strength. It is more about practicing muscle endurance or activating the chest muscles before training. Naturally, they will not include it in their daily strength training menu.

But don’t think that push-ups are just for beginners. If you really need to add more load to make them more effective, their strength training properties are even more powerful than the iron weights. I saw an older man in Jiejian Park before. He did push-ups with a 40-pound weight plate strapped to his back. He did 8 push-ups in each group. The thickness of his chest muscles was even more exaggerated than that of many people who go to the gym every day to do push-ups. Not to mention advanced variations such as waist push-ups and Russian push-ups. Anyone who can do one has a first-tier strength level. No one dares to say that this is not strength training.

In fact, this is like asking "Is running an aerobic exercise?" Of course it is for ordinary people to jog for 5 kilometers. If Su Bingtian ran a 100-meter all-out sprint, it is a proper anaerobic explosive training. The properties of the movement itself are never fixed. The classification is better to see whether you give your muscles enough stimulation when you practice, whether you can achieve progressive overload, and whether it can help you increase your strength. Whether it is push-ups or barbell bench presses, they are all good strength training movements.