Skip to the tool
Unbroken

Push-Up Challenge Plan

Test your max once. The plan writes itself from that number — three working sets at 50% of it in week one, climbing five points a week to a ceiling of 75%, plus a final set with nothing held back. 21, 30 or 60 days, four sessions and three rest days a week, every set on the page. Retest whenever you like.

The test

How many can you do right now?

One set, good form, stopping when the form goes rather than when it hurts. Do it before you read any further — a number you guessed builds a plan for somebody who does not exist.

Cannot do one on the floor? Turn this on and test the same set with your hands on a kitchen counter, a step or a bench. The angle carries the load, the arithmetic is identical, and the plan is written in incline push-ups until you turn it off.

How long
Thirty is the one people mean. Twenty-one is the honest opening if you have never held a schedule; sixty is for a base you already have.
What day 1 looks like

5 · 5 · 5 · then one set to form failure

Worked from a placeholder max of 10. Type your own and every number on this page changes.

30 days, 18 sessions, none done
30 days. Rest days are drawn cold. No sessions done.

Day 1 is today. Press a link on the chain to close a session.

One page: every day of the plan, dated, with the sets written out and a box to tick by hand. The same dialog will save it as a PDF.

The method

How the plan is worked out

The plan is built from one number you actually test rather than from a chart somebody else's body produced. Test your max once — one set to form failure, hands on the floor or on a counter or stair if that is where you can finish a rep — and everything on the page is derived from it.

The week is four sessions and three rest days, in the pattern on, on, off, on, on, off, off, repeating every seven days from Day 1. Four sessions a week clears with room to spare the muscle-strengthening recommendation in the WHO 2020 guidelines, which asks for activity of moderate or greater intensity involving all major muscle groups on two or more days a week. The rest days are not filler: they are where the work you already did lands.

The ramp is a percentage of your max, and it is printed here in full. The week number is floor((day − 1) ÷ 7), the share is min(0.50 + 0.05 × week, 0.75), and a working set is max(1, round(current max × share)). So week one is 50% of your max, week two 55%, and it climbs five points a week to a ceiling of 75% — where it stops rather than continuing, because a plan that ramps forever ramps into an injury. A session is three working sets at that number plus one final set with nothing held back.

Retest whenever you like. A new max applies from the day you logged it forward and never backwards, so the plan gets harder as you get stronger without rewriting what you already did.

Lengths are 21, 30 or 60 days and the floor on a working set is one rep, because a plan cannot divide zero into three sets. The 50% start, the five-point weekly step and the 75% ceiling are ours: they are a conservative reading of how a bodyweight ramp is usually written, not a figure from a trial.

Where this comes from

  1. 1. World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour — muscle-strengthening activity on 2 or more days a week, a strong recommendation Bull et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2020 (PubMed Central)

Unbroken counts days. It does not measure anything about your body, and nothing above is medical, nutritional or fitness advice. Where a number here is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.

Why the chart you found does not fit you

Search for a push-up challenge and you get a grid of numbers: day one, ten; day two, twelve; day thirty, a hundred. None of those charts asked you anything. They are the same numbers for a fifteen-year-old who can do forty and for somebody who cannot yet do one, which means at least one of those two people is being handed a plan that does not work — either a warm-up dressed as a challenge, or a wall to fail at in week two. That is the whole reason the format has a bad reputation, and it is fixable with one question.

So this page asks the question first. Everything after it is division: three working sets at half your tested max in week one, five points more each week, and one set at the end taken to form failure, which is also your next test. Four sessions a week, three rest days, because a muscle you loaded yesterday repairs on the day you leave it alone. Nothing is predicted. If your number goes up you log it and the plan moves with you; if it does not, the plan does not pretend it did.

One exercise on a schedule is a single rule, which is exactly what makes it a good first one. If you want the same shape without an exercise attached, the 30-day challenge tracker takes any rule you can answer yes or no. For a floor-free version of the same idea — a named format, a fixed length, a session most days — there is the pilates challenge planner. And when one rule stops being the hard part, the 75 Hard tracker runs five of them for seventy-five days with a restart at Day 1 on a miss. Before any of it, a training rule that survives December is worth ten minutes: it is the weekly shape this plan sits inside.

The questions

Frequently asked questions

What is the 30-day push-up challenge?
There is no single published version. The name covers any plan that has you doing push-ups on a fixed schedule for thirty days, and the rep counts differ from one chart to the next because nobody owns the format. This planner takes the honest route instead: it asks how many push-ups you can do in one set today and writes the whole plan from that number, so the schedule fits the person doing it rather than a stranger who wrote a chart.

How many push-ups a day should I do?
Nobody can answer that from the outside, and a chart that hands you a number without asking anything about you is guessing. The public activity guidance for adults, published by MedlinePlus, is muscle-strengthening work on two or more days a week at roughly 8 to 12 repetitions and 2 to 3 rounds, alongside 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week. This plan sets four sessions a week and works every set from the max you tested, which is the only number in it that is actually about you.

What if I cannot do a single push-up?
Enter zero and the plan runs on incline push-ups: hands on a kitchen counter, a stair or a bench, feet on the floor. The angle carries the load. As your count comes up you lower the surface — counter, then a chair, then the floor. Starting on an incline is not a lesser version of the challenge, it is the same challenge at a load you can finish.

Is there a free push-up challenge chart to print?
Yes. Build the plan and press "Print the paper grid". You get one page with every day of the challenge, the sets written out and a box to tick by hand. The same dialog will save it as a PDF. There is no email wall and no account.

How does the plan work out the numbers?
Plain arithmetic on your tested max, printed on the page so you can check it with a calculator. Three working sets at a share of that max — half of it in week one, five points more each week, capped at three quarters — and then one last set taken to the point where your form goes, which becomes your new max on the next re-test. It is a training schedule, not medical advice, and it is not a standard anybody publishes.

Is this The Push-Up Challenge fundraiser?
No. The Push-Up Challenge is a mental-health fundraising event run in Australia, with its own dates, its own daily targets and its own registration. This page is not that event, is not affiliated with it and invents none of its numbers. If you came for the event, go to its own site. If you came to build a push-up plan, this is that.

Does this save my plan?
Yes, in this browser on this device. There is no account and no email. The control at the foot of the page clears everything the page remembers, and once it is cleared there is nowhere else it exists.
Next door

More tools

Pilates Challenge Planner

Pick the length, the style and the session you will actually do. Every day gets a focus and named moves, and the record stays honest.

Challenge Rules Poster

The rules of the run, printed the way they were published. Put them on the wall before Day 1 and hold yourself to the version you actually signed.

Discipline Score Quiz

Ten questions, one number out of 100. Find out where you actually stand before you promise anyone anything.

One exercise is one rule

Unbroken runs five of them for seventy-five days, with a squad on the same board — same midnight deadline, and no editing yesterday.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play