Pike Push Up: How to Do It, Muscles Worked and Progressions

Take a push up, walk your feet in until your hips point at the ceiling, and you've turned a chest exercise into a shoulder exercise. That's the pike push up. It's the most useful bodyweight movement almost nobody does, largely because it looks awkward and because most people default to the flat version they learned at school.

The value is in the angle. Once your torso tips toward vertical, the line of resistance runs down through your shoulders rather than across your chest, so your delts and triceps have to do the pressing. No dumbbells, no rack, no excuse about not having kit.

How to do a pike push up

Bare floor works. A mat helps. Parallettes or push up handles help more, for reasons covered further down.

1. Start in a push up position. Hands slightly wider than shoulder-width, arms straight, body in a line.
2. Walk your feet in. Step your feet toward your hands until your hips are stacked high and your body forms an inverted V. Legs as straight as your hamstrings allow, though bending the knees slightly is fine and does not reduce the shoulder work.
3. Set your head position. Look back between your feet, not forward. Your head should be roughly in line with your arms, not craned up.
4. Lower. Bend your elbows and lower the crown of your head toward the floor just in front of your hands, keeping your elbows tracking at around 45 degrees rather than flaring straight out.
5. Touch and press. Lightly graze the floor with your head, then press back up until your arms lock out, keeping your hips high throughout. If your hips sag on the way up, you've drifted back into a normal push up.

Muscles worked

• Anterior and lateral deltoids. The primary movers. Pressing overhead loads the front and side of the shoulder in a way no horizontal push up can.
• Triceps. They extend the elbow through the whole rep and are usually the second thing to fatigue.
• Upper trapezius. Works to elevate and upwardly rotate the shoulder blade at the top of the press.
• Serratus anterior. Holds the shoulder blade against the rib cage. Push up variations are among the better ways to load it, and a scoping review of shoulder EMG during push up variations found serratus activity peaked in push up plus and incline variations.
• Core. Not a prime mover, but holding a rigid pike under load is genuine anti-extension work for your abs and hip flexors.

A separate EMG analysis of press up variations and progressions looked at how changing hand and body position redistributes work across the serratus, infraspinatus, anterior deltoid, pectoralis major and lats, which is essentially what you're exploiting when you pike.

Why it beats a shoulder press for some people

Not everyone can safely load a barbell overhead. If you train at home without a rack, or you're rebuilding after a shoulder problem and want a movement where you control the load with your foot position rather than by changing plates, the pike push up is easier to regulate than any weight.

It also builds pressing strength in a closed chain, where your hands are fixed and your body moves. That tends to recruit stabilisers more than an open chain press, which matters for people carrying nagging shoulder complaints. None of that makes it superior to a military press for absolute strength; it makes it a different, more accessible tool.

Common mistakes

Hips dropping mid-rep. Covered above, and worth repeating because it accounts for most of the bad reps you'll see. Film yourself from the side once and you'll fix it in a session.

Head going down behind the hands. Your head should land just in front of your fingertips, not level with them or behind. Landing too far back shortens the range and shifts load onto your traps.

Elbows flaring to 90 degrees. Straight-out elbows put the shoulder joint in its least comfortable position under load. Keep them at a diagonal, somewhere around 45 degrees from your torso.

Bouncing off the floor. Touching your head down hard and using the rebound removes the hardest part of the rep and puts an impact through your neck. Control the descent over two seconds, pause, then press.

Skipping straight to feet elevated. People see the harder version and jump to it before they can do ten clean reps on the floor. The result is a half-rep with sagging hips and sore wrists.

Progressions and regressions

Working up and down from the standard version:

• Incline pike push up (easier). Hands on a bench or step with feet on the floor. Reduces the proportion of bodyweight your shoulders carry and is the right place to start if floor pikes are impossible.
• Standard floor pike push up. The version described above.
• Feet elevated pike push up. Feet on a low box or bench, roughly 30 to 40cm. This is the single biggest jump in difficulty and where most of the shoulder growth happens. Raise the box further as you get stronger, and a plyo box gives you several heights in one piece of kit.
• Deficit pike push up. Hands on parallettes or two low blocks so your head can travel below hand level. Extends the range and hits the bottom position hard. Parallettes are the cheapest meaningful upgrade to this exercise.
• Wall handstand push up. Feet up the wall, full bodyweight through the shoulders. The end point of the progression, and a genuinely hard skill.

Sets, reps and where it fits

Slot them into an upper body day after your main pressing work, or use them as the primary shoulder movement if you train entirely with bodyweight. Two sessions a week covers the shoulder portion of the NHS recommendation to strengthen all the major muscle groups on at least two days a week.

Pair them with pull ups for a balanced vertical push and pull, and add lateral raises if you want the side delt work that pressing alone doesn't fully cover.

Kit that makes it better

You need nothing. But two cheap items change the experience.

Parallettes or push up handles keep your wrists neutral instead of bent back at 90 degrees, which removes the main reason people abandon this exercise. They also let you go deeper than the floor allows.

A box or sturdy bench for foot elevation is the other one. Books stacked on a chair works too, right up until it doesn't. Something stable matters when your head is upside down near the floor. Our push up board guide covers the handle options if you want a single piece of kit that does both.

Recommended reads

• Push up technique guide
• Military press guide
• Best parallettes UK
• Best push up board UK
• All workout guides