The number of pushups you should be able to do drops steadily with age, but even at 60 you can score well with surprisingly modest numbers. Fitness organizations like the American Council on Exercise (ACE) publish age-graded standards that break performance into categories from “needs improvement” to “excellent,” giving you a clear target no matter where you’re starting.
Pushup Standards for Women by Age
ACE’s pushup assessment rates women using modified (knee) pushups. Here’s how the numbers break down:
- Ages 20 to 29: 30 or more is excellent, 15 to 20 is good, and 9 or fewer needs improvement.
- Ages 30 to 39: 27 or more is excellent, 13 to 19 is good, and 7 or fewer needs improvement.
- Ages 40 to 49: 24 or more is excellent, 11 to 14 is good, and 4 or fewer needs improvement.
- Ages 50 to 59: 21 or more is excellent, 7 to 10 is good, and 1 or fewer needs improvement.
- Ages 60 to 69: 17 or more is excellent, 5 to 11 is good, and 1 or fewer needs improvement.
The “very good” category sits between excellent and good. For a woman in her 20s, that range is 21 to 29. For a woman in her 50s, it’s 11 to 20. The drop-off between decades is roughly 3 to 4 reps per category, which reflects the natural decline in upper-body muscle mass that accelerates after age 40.
Pushup Standards for Men by Age
Men are tested using standard (full-body) pushups, which require moving about 65 to 70 percent of your body weight through each rep. That percentage shifts slightly depending on your position: closer to 60 percent at the top of the movement and around 70 percent at the bottom. For a 180-pound man, that’s roughly 120 to 125 pounds of resistance per rep.
Because men use the full pushup position while women use the modified version, the raw numbers between the two charts aren’t directly comparable. Men’s benchmarks generally run higher in absolute terms. A man in his 20s typically needs 35 or more reps to land in the excellent range, while the threshold gradually drops with each decade. By the 50s, somewhere around 20 to 25 reps places you in strong territory, and by the 60s, the bar drops further still.
Why These Numbers Matter for Your Health
Pushup capacity isn’t just a gym metric. A large study published in JAMA Network Open tracked over 1,100 active adult men for 10 years and found that those who could complete more than 40 pushups had a 96 percent lower risk of cardiovascular events compared to those who could do fewer than 10. That’s a striking gap, and it held up even after researchers accounted for other fitness measures.
The connection makes sense when you think about what pushup capacity actually reflects. It’s not purely an arm exercise. Completing a high number of reps requires a combination of upper-body strength, core stability, muscular endurance, and a healthy body weight relative to your frame. All of those factors independently predict heart health. So while pushups aren’t a medical test, your max rep count functions as a surprisingly useful snapshot of overall fitness.
How the Test Is Actually Done
If you want to compare yourself to these standards accurately, you need to follow the same protocol used to create them. The standard fitness test requires continuous reps performed without rest. You lower your body until your chin touches the floor, then push back up to full arm extension. That’s one rep. You keep going until you physically can’t maintain proper form.
There’s no set pace, but you shouldn’t pause at the top or bottom. Most people find their number drops significantly when they use this strict form compared to casual pushups where the chest hovers a few inches above the ground. If you’ve been doing partial reps, expect your “real” number to be 20 to 40 percent lower than what you’re used to counting.
How Quickly You Can Improve
If your current number falls in the “fair” or “needs improvement” range, the good news is that pushup capacity responds quickly to training, especially for beginners. According to exercise physiologists at University Hospitals, someone new to structured exercise typically sees enough strength gains to increase their training load within two to four weeks. For pushups specifically, that means you can reasonably expect to add several reps within the first month of consistent practice.
The key principle is progressive overload: gradually increasing the demand on your muscles over time. For pushups, that means adding reps each session or each week rather than doing the same number indefinitely. If you can currently do 8 pushups, aim for 9 or 10 next session. Once you can comfortably complete 3 sets of a given number, bump it up again. Most people can move up one fitness category (say, from “fair” to “good”) within 6 to 8 weeks of training three to four days per week.
Beginners gain the fastest because their muscles are responding to a new stimulus. If you’ve been training consistently for years, expect slower progress. Adding 5 reps to a max of 15 is much easier than adding 5 reps to a max of 45.
What Affects Your Number Besides Age
Body weight plays an enormous role. Since a standard pushup requires you to lift roughly two-thirds of your body weight, a 140-pound person is pressing about 95 pounds per rep while a 220-pound person is pressing about 150 pounds. That 55-pound difference is the equivalent of strapping a weighted vest on the lighter person. If you’re carrying extra weight, your pushup number will understate your raw strength.
Training history matters too. Someone who has never done pushups will test lower than someone of the same age, weight, and general fitness level who has been practicing the movement regularly. Pushups require coordination between the chest, shoulders, triceps, and core, and your nervous system gets more efficient at recruiting all those muscles with practice. Simply doing pushups more often, even without other exercise changes, will raise your count.
Sex-based differences in upper-body muscle mass are the reason men and women use different pushup positions for the standard test. Women carry a higher proportion of their muscle mass in the lower body, which makes full pushups a comparatively harder test of overall fitness. The modified position levels the playing field so the scores reflect endurance and relative strength rather than anatomical differences.