Bodyweight Exercise Load Calculator

How much weight does a bodyweight exercise lift?

It depends on how much of you moves. A pull-up lifts close to all of you, because your hands are on the bar and the rest hangs. A push-up lifts about 64% of you, because your feet stay on the floor and hold the rest. A bench dip with your heels down lifts about 65%. Multiply that share by your body weight, then add anything strapped on.

The math

load per rep  = (body weight × coefficient) + added weight
set volume    = load per rep × reps
relative load = load per rep ÷ body weight

The coefficient is the share of your body the movement lifts, and it runs from 0.05 to 1.00. Added weight is never scaled, because a 10 kg vest is 10 kg whatever you are doing.

Where the numbers come from

Most of them are our estimates, and the table says so on every row. This matters, because a calculator that prints a confident number without saying where it came from is asking you to trust it blind.

One study covers the push-up properly, and its numbers are the measured rows in our table. Ebben and colleagues (2011) put 23 people on a force plate and measured six push-up positions. Their six measured positions are copied straight across into the table below:

Four of those values are in our table, under 11 rows in total, because one movement can be spelled several ways. Everything else in our table is an estimate rather than a measured value. We start from how the movement holds the body, then check it against a move we do have a number for, so the order stays sensible. A full front lever has to score above a tucked one. A full pistol squat has to score above a pistol to a box.

Three things to know about even the measured rows

• Ebben measured peak force, which is the hardest instant of the rep. Average load across a whole rep is a little lower. So even the 0.64 is a near-enough number, not an exact one.
• Another study got different answers. Gouvali and Boudolos (2005) found 66% for a regular push-up and 53% for the bent-knee version, against Ebben's 64% and 49%. That gap is the honest error bar.
• Hand position alone moves it a lot. The same 2005 study found a range from 52.9% to 72.9% across hand placements.

What this does not cover

• Your build. These are averages from small groups. Long legs, a heavy chest, or short arms all shift the real share, and no published table adjusts for that.
• How you move. Depth, tempo, and where your hands sit all change the load. A slow push-up to the floor is not the half rep with the same name.
• How hard it feels. Load is not effort. A dead hang and a muscle-up both score 1.00 here, and they are not the same task.
• Anything not in the table. A name we do not carry falls back to 70%, which is a middle-of-the-road guess for a pushing move and wrong for plenty of others.

Every coefficient we ship

All 569 rows are here, straight from the same table the app ships. Type in the search box below to filter the list by exercise name. The Source column says whether a row repeats a measured value or is our estimate. A movement can show up more than once because the app matches on the exercise name, so each spelling gets its own row, while the picker above collapses those spellings.

Runs, walks, swims and stretches are in here too, and those numbers are not training loads. They exist so a logged stretch does not fall on the 70% default and skew your totals.

Common questions

How much weight is a push-up?

About 64% of your body weight, measured on a standard push-up from the floor. At 80 kg that works out at roughly 51 kg per rep. The number comes from Ebben and colleagues in 2011, who had 23 people do push-ups on a force plate. Your feet stay on the floor, so they hold the rest.

How much weight is a pull-up?

Close to all of it, because your hands are on the bar and the rest of you hangs. We use 1.00 of your body weight for a pull-up, and that number is our estimate rather than a measurement. Nobody has published a force-plate study of the pull-up the way Ebben did for the push-up.

Are these numbers measured or estimated?

Both, and the Source column on every row of the table says which is which. 11 rows repeat a value from a published study. The other 558 are our own estimates, worked out from how the movement loads the body and checked against moves we do have numbers for, so every row is labelled.

Does the extra weight in my vest count?

Yes, and the weight in the vest is added on top of the percentage. The percentage only describes the part of the load that is your own body. A 10 kg vest adds a flat 10 kg per rep and is never scaled down.

Does Kinoku use these same numbers?

Yes. The page is generated from the same table the app ships, and a check on every commit compares the two. If you disagree with a number, the app lets you set your own for that exercise.

Privacy

This calculator runs in your browser, so your body weight and your exercise choice are never sent anywhere, and nothing is saved between visits. There is no email box on this page and nothing to sign up for. The calculator makes no network requests at all, so there is nothing to intercept and nothing to log.

Full story

The bodyweight load explainer covers how we built each estimate and where the published research stops. The relative strength article covers why this changes what your training log means over a cut or a bulk.

Track this in Kinoku

Bodyweight Total Load does the per-set math for free. Kinoku saves your body weight with the set, so a pull-up you did at 85 kg still reads as 85 kg after you drop to 78 kg, and the exercise detail screen charts load per rep over time. Pro adds bodyweight-relative volume normalization in the general Stats Analysis tab.

Every bodyweight exercise shows its own percentage in the app, and you can change it. If a move falls back to the 70% default, the screen says so instead of hiding it. Set your own value between 5% and 100% and new sets use your number. Sets you already logged keep the number they were saved with, so correcting a coefficient today never rewrites last year's chart.