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

Under the most widely reprinted published push-up norms, a man in his twenties is rated Good at 22-28 push-ups and Excellent at 36 or more. A man in his forties is Good at 13-16 and Excellent at 25 or more. A woman in her twenties, tested from the knees, is Good at 15-20 and Excellent at 30 or more.

Those bands come from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, whose push-up norms are the table most fitness certifications and textbooks reproduce when they answer this question. The full set, for every age band and both sexes, is below. Before you use it, read the protocol section. The number only means something alongside the test that produced it, and the men's and women's tests are not the same movement.

The push-up norms for men are based on the standard push-up from the toes. Read down your age column to find the band your rep count falls into. A man aged 30-39 doing 20 push-ups sits in the Good band. The same 20 reps at 50-59 is Very good, and at 15-19 it is Fair.

Two things are worth noticing in the men's push-up norms. The first is that the top of the table is not extreme: 36 push-ups rates Excellent at 20-29, and plenty of people who train regularly clear it. The second is that the whole table shifts down by roughly 4-6 reps per decade through the middle bands, so the same absolute number moves up a rating every ten years or so without you doing anything at all.

The push-up norms for women are based on the modified push-up, performed from the knees rather than the toes. This matters enormously and is the single most misread thing about this table. A woman who tests 25 full push-ups from her toes is not a Very good on this chart. She is off the chart, because the chart is not measuring that movement.

We have reproduced the women's push-up norms exactly as published, including the 60-69 column, where the Good band (5-11) overlaps oddly with the band above it. That is what the source says, and smoothing it would be inventing data. If you are a woman who trains full push-ups from the toes, this table is the wrong instrument for you; the military tables in our military push-up standards guide use one movement for everyone and give a cleaner comparison.

The push-up norms assume an untimed test to failure: as many consecutive, complete push-ups as you can perform before fatigue stops you, with no rest between repetitions. It is not a two-minute test, not a one-minute test, and not a set you stop when it gets hard. Change the protocol and the number stops being comparable.

1. 1Start in the down position, not the top. You begin the test already at the bottom of the first rep.
2. 2Hands flat and pointing forward, roughly shoulder width, directly under the shoulders. Hips and shoulders aligned, trunk rigid, head neutral to slightly extended.
3. 3Each rep counts only if the chest touches a marker, a coach's fist, a rolled towel or a foam block, without the stomach or body resting on the floor, and the elbows fully straighten at the top with the back straight.
4. 4The reps must be steady and consecutive. Pausing to recover breaks the test.
5. 5The test ends when you cannot complete a repetition, or when you fail to hold proper technique for two consecutive repetitions.
6. 6Men are scored on standard push-ups from the toes. Women are scored on modified push-ups from the knees. The two rating tables are built on those two different movements.

That last point is the one people get wrong most often, and it is the reason a lot of the push-up charts floating around the internet are quietly incoherent. If you want your result to mean what the table says it means, run the test the way the table was built. Our push-up test tool walks the protocol and scores the result for you, and the form guide covers what counts as a complete rep.

Push-up standards drop with age for two reasons that get tangled together. The first is genuine: from roughly the fourth decade onward, adults lose muscle mass and contractile quality gradually unless they train against it, and upper-body pressing endurance goes with it. The second is that these are descriptive norms. They record what people of each age actually did on the test, and older groups in the sample were, on average, training less.

The practical consequence is that the age bands are a moving target, not a ceiling. Nothing in the physiology says a 55-year-old cannot do 30 push-ups; the norms simply say that not many 55-year-olds in the reference sample did. Resistance training remains effective across the lifespan, and a trained 60-year-old routinely posts numbers that the table calls Excellent for a 30-year-old.

So treat the age column as a starting handicap, not a verdict. If you are 50 and land in Fair, the useful reading is not that you are a normal 50-year-old. It is that you have a specific, trainable gap and a specific, published number to aim at. Our guide on how to increase push-ups covers the fastest way to move a rating band.

A good number of push-ups is one that clears the Good band for your age and sex on the table above: 22 or more for a man in his twenties, 17 or more in his thirties, 13 or more in his forties. That is the honest, sourced answer. The more interesting question is whether the number means anything beyond bragging rights, and there is one well-known study on that.

In 2019, Yang and colleagues published a ten-year cohort study in JAMA Network Open following 1,104 active male firefighters. Men who could complete more than 40 push-ups at baseline had a 96% lower incidence of cardiovascular disease events over the follow-up period than men who could complete fewer than 10. Push-up capacity was more strongly associated with future events in that cohort than a submaximal treadmill test was.

That finding is genuinely striking and it is also narrow. The cohort was 1,104 occupationally active middle-aged men with a mean age of 39.6, there were only 37 cardiovascular events in total across ten years, and the authors state plainly that the results may not generalise to women, to men of other ages, or to less active men. It is an association in a specific population, not a dose you can prescribe yourself. Read it as one more reason that upper-body endurance is worth having, not as a promise.

One useful sanity check on the age norms is to put them next to a real test with real consequences. Military push-up standards are published, sex-specific, age-banded and enforced, and they measure the same basic capacity, with the difference that they are timed and the Army uses a hand-release variant rather than a standard push-up.

The gap between those two rows is the point. Passing the Army test takes 14 hand-release push-ups for a man in his early twenties, which is well below the Fair band on the civilian norms; scoring 100 points takes 61, which is far above Excellent. A published standard usually has a floor set low enough that almost everyone clears it and a ceiling set high enough that almost nobody does. Full tables for every branch are in our military push-up standards guide.

A push-up test result is only worth the training decision you make from it. Once you have a number and a rating band, the useful next step depends far less on your age than on where you landed.

1. 1

   If you are in Needs improvement or Fair

   Do not train max sets. Train volume at a difficulty you can control, incline push-ups against a bench or a wall, full range and a clean line, then add reps before you add difficulty. The beginner progression lays out the whole ladder from the wall to the floor.

2. 2

   If you are in Good or Very good

   You have a base and the fastest gains now come from frequency and from grease-the-groove style submaximal practice rather than from grinding sets to failure. Our guide on how to increase push-ups covers the specific methods.

3. 3

   If you are in Excellent

   The norms have stopped being informative for you. Pick a real target instead, 50 consecutive push-ups or the 100 almost nobody reaches, and follow a structured progression like the one in how to do 100 push-ups.

4. 4

   Then set a re-test date

   Two to four weeks out, same protocol, same time of day, same conditions. A number you cannot compare to anything is a number you cannot learn from. If you want the target set for you from your current max, the program generator builds a progression around it.

If you would rather have a rank than a percentile, the samurai rank calculator converts lifetime reps into the titles the app uses, Ashigaru through to Daimyō, which are age-blind on purpose. A title is a target you can chase. A norms table is a mirror.