Pushups: Why They Feel Harder Than Lifting and Their Unique Demands

Why are pushups harder than lifting?

Pushups often feel more challenging than many forms of weightlifting due to their unique biomechanical demands, which involve a significant proportion of your body weight as resistance, require extensive full-body stabilization, and operate as a closed kinetic chain exercise.

Understanding the Core Question: Perceived Difficulty

The perception that pushups are "harder" than lifting weights is common, particularly among those new to bodyweight training or comparing a standard pushup to a relatively lighter weighted exercise. This isn't to say that heavy lifting isn't challenging, but rather that the nature of the challenge differs significantly. A pushup leverages your entire body against gravity, demanding a unique blend of strength, stability, and coordination that external weightlifting, depending on the exercise, may not replicate in the same way.

The Biomechanics of Leverage and Load

One of the primary reasons for the perceived difficulty lies in the biomechanics of the pushup itself:

• Resistance as a Percentage of Body Weight: Unlike lifting a fixed external weight, a pushup requires you to move a significant percentage of your own body weight. While the exact percentage varies with hand and foot placement, it typically ranges from 60-70% of your total body weight at the bottom of the movement. For an individual weighing 180 lbs, this means effectively pushing approximately 108-126 lbs. If this is more than they can bench press with proper form, the pushup will naturally feel harder.
• Leverage and Moment Arm: In a pushup, your body acts as a lever. The fulcrum (pivot point) is your feet (or knees), and the resistance (your body's center of mass) is distributed along your torso. The hands act as the point where force is applied to overcome this resistance. The length of the resistance arm (distance from your feet to your shoulders/chest) creates a substantial torque that your chest, shoulders, and triceps must overcome. In contrast, many traditional lifts, like a dumbbell press, position the weight more directly over the working muscles, potentially reducing the leverage challenge.

Closed-Chain vs. Open-Chain Kinematics

The type of kinetic chain involved in an exercise profoundly impacts muscle activation and stability demands:

• Closed Kinetic Chain (Pushup): In a closed kinetic chain exercise, the distal segment (e.g., your hands in a pushup) is fixed or meets substantial resistance. This means your body moves relative to your hands. This type of movement generally recruits more muscles synergistically across multiple joints, enhancing joint stability and proprioception (your body's sense of its position in space).
• Open Kinetic Chain (Most Lifting): In an open kinetic chain exercise, the distal segment (e.g., your hands holding a dumbbell in a bench press) is free to move in space. While effective for targeting specific muscles, it often requires less full-body stabilization compared to its closed-chain counterpart.

The closed-chain nature of the pushup means your entire body must work as a cohesive unit to maintain a rigid plank, from your head to your heels, placing greater demands on overall body control and stability.

Beyond Prime Movers: The Role of Stabilizer Muscles

While both pushups and bench presses primarily target the pectoralis major, anterior deltoids, and triceps, the pushup engages a far broader range of muscles for stabilization:

• Core Engagement: Maintaining a straight body line throughout a pushup critically depends on strong activation of the rectus abdominis, obliques, and erector spinae (your entire core musculature) to prevent sagging hips or piking.
• Scapular Stabilizers: Muscles like the serratus anterior and rhomboids work intensely to stabilize the shoulder blades against the rib cage, preventing "winging" and ensuring efficient force transfer.
• Glutes and Quadriceps: Even your lower body muscles are actively engaged to maintain hip extension and a rigid base, contributing to the full-body tension required.

In many isolated lifting exercises, the need for this extensive synergistic and stabilizing muscle activation is reduced, as external support (like a bench) or the nature of the movement limits the degrees of freedom.

Neuromuscular Coordination and Full-Body Tension

The pushup is a complex motor pattern that requires high levels of neuromuscular coordination. You're not just pushing weight; you're coordinating multiple muscle groups across your entire body to move a significant portion of your mass in a controlled, stable manner. This demand for full-body tension and intermuscular coordination can make the movement feel more challenging than isolated lifts where the focus is on moving a specific weight through a defined range of motion with less overall body involvement.

Progressive Overload: A Different Path

The ability to progressively overload an exercise also plays a role in perceived difficulty. With lifting, you can typically add very small increments of weight (e.g., 2.5 lbs) to gradually increase resistance. With bodyweight exercises like pushups, increasing resistance isn't as straightforward:

• Modifications for Progression: To make pushups harder, you typically need to alter leverage (e.g., feet elevated, decline pushups), reduce the base of support (e.g., one-arm pushups), add external load (e.g., weighted vest), or increase instability (e.g., on unstable surfaces).
• Initial Threshold: For many beginners, 60-70% of their body weight is a significant initial resistance, making even the first few repetitions challenging, whereas they might comfortably lift a lighter external weight.

Context is Key: Comparing Apples to Oranges

It's important to remember that "lifting" is a broad term. Comparing a pushup to a 5-pound bicep curl is vastly different from comparing it to a maximal deadlift. The perceived difficulty largely depends on the specific lifting exercise and the load used. However, when comparing a pushup to a chest exercise like a bench press with a moderate load, the unique demands of the pushup often make it feel more globally challenging due to its inherent nature as a full-body, closed-chain, bodyweight movement.

Conclusion: Embracing the Challenge

The "hardness" of a pushup is not a flaw, but rather a testament to its effectiveness as a comprehensive strength and stability exercise. It forces your body to work as an integrated unit, engaging a wide array of muscles beyond the primary movers. Understanding these biomechanical and physiological distinctions highlights why pushups are a foundational exercise in any well-rounded fitness program, offering benefits in core strength, full-body stability, and functional movement that complement traditional weight training.