Press Up

Testing your strength is a good way of monitoring progression, the Press Up fitness test will primary test the Chest & Arm muscles, specifically the Pectorals Major, Minor and Triceps Brachi muscles together with stabilizing shoulder and core muscles. The Press Up or Push Up exercise depending how you refer to the exercise is a functional and compound exercise recruiting more than one muscle group. This make it a very metabolic exercise, great for developing strength and burning calories.

The Test

This strength test is a relatively straight forward test of muscular and physical strength and endurance, especially the chest, shoulders and triceps which are the prime movers in this exercise.

This test has been performed with time limits of both 1 and 2 minutes in which the participant must complete as many press ups as possible with near perfect technique on each reputation. This test is popular in the army other military institutions in which you must complete as many press ups in 2 minutes, this requires good strength and endurance and is no easy task. I however would suggest performing this test in one minute if you are looking at strength and power testing and go up to 2 minutes for an insight to strength and endurance testing.

Another method is to perform the test until absolute failure, the point in which the subject is unable to complete any more repetitions. This is likely to happen within 2 minutes for most individuals anyway which test you use is down to personal preference and how relative each one is to the subjects goals. The normal values at the end of this article is for this test version, to fatigue.