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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.”
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:
The left two columns are carrying angles of men (right and left hand), and the other two are of women. Credit: Beth SkwareckiThis 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.
“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.”
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
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!
“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].”
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