Why I Won't Be Doing 'Women's Pushups'

It’s frustrating to follow fitness content online as a woman when so much of it feels like it is written for men. Likewise, it’s frustrating to work hard at a seemingly simple exercise like pushups and feel like you’re not getting anywhere. Some influencers have proposed a solution to both problems: a change in hand placement for pushups that is supposed to better complement women’s anatomy. I’m not buying it. 

See, I’ve been around fitness spaces (male-dominated and otherwise) long enough to have built a healthy skepticism around advice and products aimed solely at women. There’s a huge variation in strengths, weaknesses, and body proportions from one person to another, and many of the supposed differences between men's and women's fitness have nothing to do with gender. Rather, they can be chalked up to factors like body size, muscle mass, and training age. In short, I have more in common with other people—male or female—who share my body proportions, my strength background, or my training goals, than I do with a generalized "womankind."

Given that, I had doubts about this particular pushup hack for women, but I figured I needed to give it a chance before passing judgment. Certainly it's fair to play around with different hand placements and decide which one works for you. But is there really an anatomical difference that means women need a different hand placement in order to do their best pushups? 

Why women are being told to change their hand placement when doing pushups

I’ve been seeing this hack all over fitness social media. It suggests that, while doing pushups, women should turn their hands slightly outward (some say 45 degrees). This is usually explained in terms of the “carrying angle"—an angle of the elbow that tends to differ between men and women. (More about what that means below.)

For an example, check out this video from Kayla Lee, who describes herself as a women’s anatomy and biomechanics instructor. You’ll notice there isn’t a strong connection presented between anatomy and the pushup hack; she even points out that the carrying angle isn’t a factor in the hand position we use for pushups, and the hand position she recommends has more to do with shoulder rotation. There’s no gender-related reason given that has anything to do with shoulder rotation. 

The video makes strong claims, but doesn’t connect them logically. In the caption, Lee mentions the carrying angle, then says “now look at how pushups are typically coached,” and gives two standard pushup cues that don’t relate to hand placement at all. Then, the caption continues, when we “force women into that same template,” we injure their bodies and reduce training morale. 

None of those points seem connected to me, and the more examples I found of this hack being explained online, the less any of it made sense. Why would the carrying angle affect your shoulder position or hand placement? Why is the carrying angle the most important thing to consider when choosing a hand placement? Is the carrying angle even that different between men and women? I needed to dig deeper.

What "carrying angle" actually means

All this Internet talk of the “carrying angle” reminded me uncomfortably of the kinds of criteria looksmaxxers use to study each other’s faces. I suspect the focus on the term stems from a similar urge: the idea that there’s something measurable that explains the difference between groups of people, and that it can offer a definitive answer as to why you're having a harder time in life than others seem to be experiencing.

But if you read anatomy papers that discuss carrying angle, you'll see it's not exactly revelatory. When you stand with your arms at your sides and your palms facing forward, your forearm and upper arm don’t form a straight line; your forearm is angled slightly away from your body, and this is your carrying angle. And it is slightly greater in women than in men, on average. It’s called the carrying angle because, at one point, it was hypothesized that it helps women’s forearms to avoid touching their hips as they carry things. That idea didn’t pan out—it turns out the reason our arms don’t touch our hips while carrying groceries is that we deliberately hold our arms away from our bodies. 

In fact, when discussing the carrying angle, Kayla Lee inserts a flash of this paper to support her claims. And it's in this paper where I learned that last fact: “It is abduction [moving the arm away from the body] at the shoulder and not the carrying angle which keeps the swinging upper limbs away from the side of the pelvis during walking.” That paper also disagrees that carrying angle is determined by gender: “the carrying angle is more in shorter persons as compared to taller persons. ... Carrying angle is not a secondary sex character.” 

Remember when I said that many supposed differences between men and women come down to factors like body size rather than sex or gender itself? The carrying angle seems to be a lot like the famous Q angle of the thighbone: different on average between men and women, but having more to do with height than gender. Here’s the conclusion from one of several papers that have studied the question: “The slight difference in Q angles between men and women can be explained by the fact that men tend to be taller.”

Why you don't actually need a “women’s” pushup hack

Two more things make me doubt this hack even more. One is that the carrying angle is only really noticeable when your hands are supinated (palms up), and that’s not the hand position you use when doing pushups. When you flip your hand palm-down—as you would in order to do a pushup—the carrying angle greatly decreases, and often disappears. 

The other significant problem is that even if women’s carrying angle is generally greater, there’s a lot of overlap between men’s and women’s carrying angles. Here’s a graph from a 2005 paper that measured the right and left arms of 1,275 people: 

As you can see, the average carrying angle for women is slightly higher than for men, but it’s not like all men have low angles and all women have high angles. Rather, the male and female populations both have a range that includes similarly high and low carrying angles. If "standard" pushup advice only applied to the average man, there would be plenty of men and women who wouldn't fit into it. 

This raises the question of what “standard” pushup advice is, anyway. The way I’ve been taught to do pushups, and the way I advise others to do them, is to find a hand position that feels comfortable and strong. That will be different for everyone, and I think most trainers already know that.

What women really need to do for better pushups

To distill what I’d learned into actual advice, I reached out to Diana Jordan, a physical therapist and weightlifting coach at Pittsburgh Fitness Project. She confirmed that carrying angle is a real thing, and that the average carrying angle differs between men and women. Then she said this: 

“There are so many other possible anatomical variations that could play a role in choosing a comfortable pushup position such as chest and shoulder width, the ratio of your humerus [upper arm bone] to your forearm, strength of pecs vs triceps, and shoulder mobility vs stability. In my opinion, choosing a specific pushup based on one typical variant that occurs between sexes (and notice, there’s also overlap in the amount of carrying angle between men and women around 10 degrees) seems silly.”

So perhaps you’d do better pushups with a slight angle to your hands, but maybe not! Social media is full of women trying the women’s pushup hack and finding it doesn’t help—but occasionally, it does. I've tried the hack, and there's a simple reason I won't be using it for my own pushups: it's not particularly comfortable for me. I'm stronger with my fingers pointed a little more forward.

In short, rather than looking for answers in gendered advice, we all need to find body positions that work for us. Jordan recommends choosing your exercise positioning or variations based on factors like what feels most comfortable, what lets you access your full range of motion, what makes you feel more stable, and, most importantly, what you happen to prefer. 

The problem with women’s exercise hacks

I keep seeing this sort of gendered exercise advice all over social media, and often it boils down all the complexity Jordan talked about to an assumption that one particular hack will meet every woman’s needs. As a trainer myself, I’ve talked people through finding, say, the right foot position for squats—I have them try wider, narrower, feet straight, feet angled, and figure out what works for them. Personally, I do best with a narrow stance and a slight angle to my feet, but there are people online who will tell you that women “should” squat with a wide, toes-out stance. That’s just not true.

There are so many different exercises in the world, and so many ways to do each of them, that we can all find several variations that work for us. To bring it back to pushups, let’s not forget that there are all kinds of hand placement variations: diamond pushups, wide-grip pushups, tricep pushups, planche pushups. Locking yourself into just one position means ignoring all the variety out there. Variety benefits you!

When I see an influencer argue that I need to use a “women’s” technique, I feel as if I’ve walked into a store filled with clothes in every shape and size and style, only to be taken aside by someone who tells me that none of those options are for me, and that I can only wear a specific, one-size-fits-all women’s outfit. I feel that way even though I know that a majority of strength training content is made with men in mind, and that less research has been done on women than on men—that fact doesn’t mean that we need to dismiss everything we know about training, especially if we’re throwing out scientific understanding and replacing it with pseudoscience or just vibes. 

“This is tough,” Jordan says, “because railing against the lack of research that involves women and railing against institutions made for men is so hot right now (and I get it!) ... [But] there has been copious research showing that females and males respond similarly to resistance and aerobic training.” 

If we really want to make sure more women can benefit from strength training, the answer doesn’t lie in small tweaks to exercise technique, but in recognizing the much larger social and societal barriers. Jordan says: “Messages like ‘you should only do pushups this way’ or ‘you should rest specific weeks in your menstrual cycle’ perpetuate the idea of female fragility and increase the barriers" to even starting to exercise.