Archer Push-Up: Form, Readiness Test and 5-Stage Progression

The archer push-up is a push-up done from a very wide hand position in which you lower toward one hand while the other arm stays straight out to the side, like an archer drawing a bow. The bent arm does most of the pressing, which makes it the standard bridge between regular push-ups and the one-arm push-up.

Guides that give a number ask for anywhere from 10 to 30 regular push-ups before you try it; the readiness test below tells you which version to start with. Start with 3 sets of up to 5 per side and build to 3 sets of 8.

This guide covers what the exercise trains, how to do it, what 27 published guides recommend, how much load the working arm really carries, a readiness test, a five-stage progression and where it fits in a workout.

Key takeaways

• Of 27 published guides, the eight that give an entry bar ask for anywhere from 10 to 30 regular push-ups first. Our readiness test starts the high-incline archer at 8 strict push-ups.
• Of the 16 guides that give reps per side, 12 cover the whole range from 5 to 8. Build to 3 sets of 8 per side before moving to a harder version.
• Six guides say the working arm carries 65 to 80 percent of bodyweight. None cites a measurement, and a PubMed search for “archer push-up” returns no records.
• Order the easier versions by measured push-up load (Ebben 2011): high incline, knees, low incline, floor, feet raised.
• Use hands 1.5 to 2 times shoulder width. Eighteen of the 27 guides only say “wider”.

What the archer push-up trains

These are the same pressing muscles as a regular push-up, with the load shifted toward one side. We found no study that measured muscle activity in the archer push-up (more on that below), so the table is based on what each joint is doing, not on lab data.

How to do an archer push-up

1. Set your hands. Start in a high plank with your hands about 1.5 to 2 times shoulder-width apart, fingers turned out a little. Keep your feet at hip-width or slightly wider for balance.
2. Brace. Squeeze your glutes and tighten your abs so your body is one straight line from head to heels.
3. Shift and lower. Move your chest toward your right hand and bend the right elbow, keeping it angled back toward your ribs rather than flared straight out. Your left arm straightens out to the side as you go down.
4. Go down to the bottom. Lower until your chest is a fist’s height from the floor beside your right hand, with your left arm fully straight.
5. Press back up through the right hand to the wide plank. That is one rep on the right side. Do the next rep to the left.

Fine-tuning the width. At the bottom, the straight arm should be fully straight without your chest drifting past the working hand. If the straight arm has to bend to reach the floor, your hands are too close. If you cannot get your chest over the working hand, bring them in a little.

Alternate or one side at a time? Of the 27 guides, 11 say alternate each rep, 7 say either works, one says do all reps on one side, and 8 do not say. Alternating is easier to learn and keeps both sides even. Doing all your reps on one side first makes each set harder. Either way, count reps per side.

What 27 archer push-up guides recommend

We collected 27 English-language archer push-up guides from Google’s US results and related searches on 4 November 2026 and coded what each one tells readers to do.

Four things stand out:

• The entry bar is all over the place. The eight guides that give a number ask for 10 (Habuild), 15 (Calixpert, Gymless, The Workout Mag), 20 (Calisthenics Corner), 25 to 30 (Trainrboost, Hundred) or 25 or more (Repsify) regular push-ups. That is a spread from 10 to 30 for the same exercise. The readiness test below gives you one set of entry rules instead.
• Rep advice mostly overlaps. The per-side ranges run from 2 to 20 reps, and 12 of the 16 cover the whole span from 5 to 8. That is where this guide’s targets sit.
• Hand width is vague. Eighteen guides only say “wider than shoulder width”, and five of those say “slightly wider”. The nine that give a number say 1.5 times (five guides), twice (three) or 1.5 to 2 times shoulder width (one). With the hands only slightly wider than the shoulders, there is little room for the straight arm to straighten at the bottom, which is why this guide uses 1.5 to 2 times.
• Easier versions are named, but few say when to move between them. The most common are the knee archer (12 guides), the incline archer with the hands raised (11) and a shorter range of motion (8). Eight guides name no easier archer version at all. Only seven give a rule for moving to a harder version, and one of those (Repsify) only for the jump to one-arm work. The six that give a number range from 8 per side to 2 or 3 sets of 12 per side.

How we got this. We took 33 guide URLs from the Google US results for “archer push up”, “archer push ups” and “archer push up progression” (via DataForSEO) and four related web searches, excluding video and social posts.

Five pages could not be fetched (four blocked our script, one server error) and were dropped. One more returned no article text and was excluded, leaving 27. Each page’s text was saved and coded by hand.

The data covers one day of search results; guides change, and coding free text involves some judgment. With 27 pages, read these as counts, not percentages of all guides.

How much weight is on the working arm?

Six of the 27 guides give a figure: four say the working arm carries 70 to 80 percent of your bodyweight, one says up to 80 percent, and one says 65 to 75 percent. None of them cites a measurement, and a PubMed search for “archer push-up” on 4 November 2026 returned no records.

What has been measured is the regular push-up. Force-plate studies put the load on both hands together at about 64 percent of body mass at its peak during the rep in 23 recreationally fit adults (Ebben 2011), and at 69 percent in the top position and 75 percent at the bottom in 28 strength-trained men holding still (Suprak 2011). Your feet carry the rest.

So a single arm carrying 70 to 80 percent of your bodyweight would carry about as much as, or more than, both hands together in a regular push-up: 69 to 75 percent in Suprak’s static holds, 64 percent at the peak in Ebben’s study. Yet in an archer the working arm takes most of the hand load, not all of it: some always goes through the straight arm.

The wide archer position may shift the hand-foot split a little, but nobody has measured it. We do not give a percentage here, and you should be skeptical of pages that do.

Ebben’s study is also useful for ordering the easier versions. It measured how much each common push-up change alters the load on the hands:

Those numbers are for regular push-ups with the hands at about shoulder width, not archers. We assume the archer follows the same order, and the stages below use it: high incline, then knees, then low incline, then the floor, then feet raised.

One caveat: in the same study’s table of raw force in newtons, the knee push-up and the 24-inch incline swap places, so treat stages 1 and 2 as close in difficulty.

Find your starting stage

After a warm-up, test in this order and stop at the first step you cannot pass:

1. Strict push-ups. Do one set with your body straight and your chest to a fist’s height from the floor. Fewer than 8: work on the push-up progression first. From 8 to 14: start at stage 1. Fifteen or more: go to step 2.
2. Wide push-ups. Hands 1.5 to 2 times shoulder width, one set. Fewer than 10: start at stage 1. Ten or more: go to step 3.
3. Knee archers. One set per side. Fewer than 3 clean reps per side: start at stage 1. From 3 to 7: start at stage 2. Eight or more: go to step 4.
4. Floor archers. One set per side. Fewer than 5 clean reps per side: start at stage 3. Five or more: start at stage 4. If you can already do 3 sets of 8 per side in training, start at stage 5.

Each step is a single set: it places you, and the 3-set targets below decide when you move up. Test both sides and start at the stage of your weaker side.

The 15 strict + 10 wide bar matches Calixpert’s; the 8-push-up entry point and the incline, knee and archer cut-offs are ours. The 15-push-up bar sits inside the guides’ 10 to 30 range; the high-incline stage starts lower because it carries less load.

Our push-up progression puts the archer after 3 sets of 20 full push-ups, tempo push-ups and feet-elevated push-ups; the incline and knee stages here let you start the archer pattern sooner, with less load.

The five-stage progression

Train it two or three times a week, with at least a day between sessions. Do 3 sets per side with 90 to 120 seconds of rest. Start each stage with as many clean reps as you can do, up to 5 per side, and add a rep when you can. Move up when you can do 3 sets of 8 per side with clean reps: straight arm locked, hips square, chest to a fist’s height from the floor.

These targets are our own coaching rules, set so each stage builds the strength the next one needs. No study has tested them.

Stage 1: High-incline archer. Put your hands on something sturdy about 24 inches high: a bench, the third stair (about 21 to 23 inches up on most US home staircases) or two plyo boxes of the same height. Check that the surface is wide enough for your hands at 1.5 to 2 times shoulder width; a single box top usually is not. Do the archer pattern exactly as on the floor. With the hands this high, you are in the lightest position in Ebben’s body-mass table above.

Stage 2: Knee archer. Same hand position as the floor version, with your knees on a mat and your body straight from head to knees. It teaches the full floor range with less load.

Stage 3: Low-incline archer. Hands on a sturdy step, a low bench or two equal stacks of large books, about 12 inches high and wide enough for the full hand position. In Ebben’s data this position sits between the knee and floor versions, so it splits the jump from knees to floor into two smaller steps.

Stage 4: Floor archer. The full exercise as described above. Stages 1 to 3 exist to get you here, so there is no rush to leave: stay until all three sets of 8 per side are clean.

Stage 5: Harder archer. First put your feet on a 12-inch box. Then, back on the floor, give less help with the straight arm: press only through its fingertips (a cue Men’s Health UK, Habuild and The Workout Mag also give), then let it rest on the floor without pushing.

From there the next step is the uneven push-up with one hand on a low block, rung 7 of our push-up progression, on the way to the one-arm push-up.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

Where it fits in a workout

As your main push. Put it first in an upper-body or push session, when you are fresh, and pair it with a pull such as chin-ups so your back keeps up with your chest. Our upper body calisthenics workout shows how to balance the pushing and pulling sets in a session.

Instead of high-rep push-ups. Once regular push-ups take sets of 30 or more to feel hard, swap one or two of those sets for archers at 5 to 8 per side. You keep the sets short and the load high without needing a weight vest.

On the one-arm path. Four of the guides give a threshold for moving on to one-arm work, from 8 or more clean archers per side (Gymless) or 8 to 10 (Habuild, Repsify) to 3 sets of 10 per side (Calisthenics Corner). Stage 5 above and the last two rungs of the push-up progression take you from there.

Frequently asked questions

How hard are archer push-ups?

Much harder than regular push-ups, because one arm does most of the pressing while the other stays straight. The eight guides we reviewed that give a number ask for 10 to 30 regular push-ups before starting archer push-ups. If you are not there yet, start with the incline or knee archer in this guide.

What muscles do archer push-ups work?

The bent arm does the pressing: chest, front of the shoulder and triceps. The straight arm holds a smaller share of the load and keeps you steady, and the trunk muscles stop your hips from twisting toward the working side. We found no study that measured muscle activity in the archer push-up itself.

How many archer push-ups should I do?

Start with 3 sets of up to 5 per side and build to 3 sets of 8 per side, two or three times a week. Of the 16 published guides we found that give reps per side, 12 cover the whole 5 to 8 range. Move to a harder version once all three sets of 8 are clean.

How many push-ups should I be able to do before archer push-ups?

Guides disagree: the eight that give a number ask for anything from 10 to 30 regular push-ups. Our readiness test starts you on the high-incline archer at 8 strict push-ups, and asks for 15 strict and 10 wide push-ups before any later stage.

Are archer push-ups better than regular push-ups?

They are harder, not better. Once regular push-ups take sets of 30 or more to feel challenging, the archer push-up lets you keep sets in a lower rep range without adding weight. It also trains each side on its own, so a weaker side cannot hide behind the stronger one.

Do archer push-ups lead to a one-arm push-up?

They are the usual stepping stone. Four of the guides we reviewed give a threshold for moving on to one-arm work, from 8 clean archer push-ups per side to 3 sets of 10 per side. After that, the next steps are taking support away from the straight arm and the uneven push-up with one hand on a block.

Where to start

The archer push-up lets you load one arm at a time long before a one-arm push-up is within reach. Run the four-step readiness test once, start at the stage it gives you, and train it two or three times a week until all three sets of 8 per side are clean. If the test sends you back to regular push-ups, the push-up progression builds the 8 strict reps that open stage 1.

Sources

• Ebben WP, Wurm B, VanderZanden TL, et al. Kinetic analysis of several variations of push-ups. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011. Coefficients and newton values taken from the conference version: Wurm B, VanderZanden TL, Spadavecchia M, et al., Ebben WP. Kinetic analysis of several variations of push-ups. ISBS Conference Proceedings Archive.
• Suprak DN, Dawes J, Stephenson MD. The effect of position on the percentage of body mass supported during traditional and modified push-up variants. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011.
• Guide survey data: 27 archer push-up guides collected 4 November 2026, coded by bestcalisthenicsworkout.com. Guides referenced by name: Habuild, Calixpert, Gymless, The Workout Mag, Calisthenics Corner, Trainrboost, Hundred, Repsify.