Here's the short version of how to breathe during pushups: inhale through your nose as you lower yourself, exhale through your mouth as you press back up, and keep your core braced the entire time. Don't hold your breath through a set — the only exception is a brief brace on a genuine max-effort rep.
How to breathe during pushups: inhale down, exhale up
Every pushup has two halves. The descent is the eccentric phase, where your chest, shoulders and triceps lengthen under load. The press back to lockout is the concentric phase — the hard part, where you actually produce force. The pattern nearly every coach teaches maps directly onto those two halves:
- Inhale as you lower. Through the nose, over roughly two seconds, filling your belly and lower ribs rather than your upper chest.
- Exhale as you press. Through the mouth or pursed lips, starting the moment you reverse direction and continuing until your elbows lock.
- Reset at the top. Lockout is your rest position. That's where the next inhale begins.
So if you're asking do you inhale or exhale when doing a pushup — you exhale on the way up, on the effort. Inhaling on the way up is the reversal people fall into when they get tired, and it usually turns into an accidental breath-hold within a few reps. A cue that helps: think "blow the floor away" as you press, so the exhale starts early instead of arriving after you've already ground through the hardest part.
Why this direction and not the other
Exhaling on exertion is a long-standing strength-training convention rather than a proven performance booster — for submaximal reps, the evidence that breathing pattern meaningfully changes force output looks thin in either direction. Its real job is to guarantee you're breathing at all during the phase where people instinctively clamp down, and to give every rep the same tempo. Tempo is what stops a set degrading into fast, shallow half-reps once fatigue arrives.
Breathing and bracing are two different jobs
A pushup is a moving plank. If your midsection is soft your hips sag, your lower back takes load it shouldn't, and the press tends to get harder because force leaks out between your shoulders and your feet. So you need core tension — but tension is not the same thing as a held breath.
Set the brace before your first rep: squeeze your glutes and tighten your abs to a firm but clearly sub-maximal tension (think "someone's about to poke my stomach," not "I'm bracing for a punch"), then hold that tension continuously and breathe around it. Your belly will still expand a little on the inhale, and that's fine. What shouldn't happen is your midsection going slack every time you breathe in.
Hips that dip on the descent and pop up on the press mean the brace is dropping — and that's usually what's hiding your real depth too. If you're not certain you're reaching full range in the first place, sort that out first with how low you should actually go in a pushup.
Should you hold your breath during pushups?
No — not through a set. Holding your breath while you strain is the Valsalva maneuver, and repeating it rep after rep raises pressure inside your chest, which can sharply raise blood pressure and reduce blood return to the heart. The practical results are the ones you've probably felt: a red face, a pounding head, lightheadedness at the end of a set, and sometimes a grey-out feeling when you stand up afterward (Linsenbardt et al., 1992).
There's a training cost too. A breath-hold has a hard time limit, so holding through reps 8 to 14 tends to mean arriving at rep 15 already short of air you never needed to give up — and gasping your way out of the set before your muscles are actually done. Usually it isn't even deliberate: people just stop breathing without noticing, right around the point the set gets hard.
The one exception: bracing for a true max-effort rep
A short brace-and-hold does have a place. On a genuine one- or two-rep-max effort — a heavy weighted pushup, a one-arm attempt, or the very first full pushup you've ever gotten — briefly holding a little air stiffens your torso into a more rigid platform to press from. It's the same reason powerlifters use it under a heavy bar. If you use it, keep it short and controlled:
- Take a breath in at the top — a partial breath, not a maximal gulp.
- Brace hard, lower under control, and hold that pressure through the bottom.
- Exhale as soon as you're past the hardest part of the press, not after you've locked out.
- Breathe normally between reps. One rep, one brace — never a whole set.
Skip this entirely if you have high blood pressure, a heart condition, glaucoma or another eye condition, if you're pregnant, or if you're new to training — the pressure spike is the whole mechanism, and it's exactly what those conditions make risky. Ask a doctor first if any of that applies to you. And regardless: if you get dizzy, see spots, or feel sharp pressure in your head or chest, stop the set. Lightheadedness, chest pressure or unusual breathlessness that shows up during ordinary, easy sets is worth raising with a doctor rather than training through.
How to breathe to do more pushups in a row
How do you breathe to do more pushups in a row? Pick a tempo, breathe to it from rep one, and never let the breathing fall behind the reps. Plenty of people who stall at 20 aren't out of muscle so much as out of rhythm — they sprinted the first ten, lost the pattern, and spent the rest of the set chasing air they should have been taking all along.
Five things that tend to add reps to a long set:
- Breathe deep from the first rep, not the first hard rep. Full breaths while it's easy buy you room later. Starting shallow means starting in debt.
- Exhale fully, don't sip. A half-empty exhale leaves no space for the next inhale. Push the air all the way out on the press.
- Breathe at the top, not the bottom. At lockout your ribcage is free to expand; at the bottom you're compressed and the inhale will be shallow no matter how hard you try.
- Add a reset breath late in the set. Once reps get grindy, pause at lockout for one extra full breath every two or three reps. It costs a couple of seconds and usually gives back more than it takes.
- Switch to mouth-in when you need volume. Nose breathing is a fine default, but late in a max set you need airflow more than nasal purity.
All of that depends on a steady cadence, and cadence is the first thing to go when you're grinding: reps speed up, get shallower, and your breathing stops matching them. What fixes it is an external beat — a partner counting out loud, a metronome, or a counter that only registers full-range reps. Pushup RPG, the free iOS and Android app behind this site, does that last one with the front camera and on-device pose detection, so each confirmed rep becomes a beat you can breathe against: rep counted, exhale finished, breathe in, go again.
If you want to know what the rhythm is worth, test it: run a proper max pushup test breathing however you normally do, then again a week later holding a deliberate two-seconds-down, one-second-up cadence from the very first rep.
Which breathing pattern for which set
The default covers almost everything you'll ever do. The variations are narrow:
| Type of set | Breathing pattern | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Warm-up / easy reps | Nose in on the way down, nose or mouth out on the way up | Relaxed, builds the habit before it matters |
| Normal training set (8–25 reps) | Inhale down, exhale up, brace held throughout | Sustainable rhythm; nothing clever required |
| Max test or AMRAP | Same, plus a reset breath at lockout once reps get hard | Buys recovery without breaking position |
| Slow negatives / paused reps | Breathe continuously; two or three breaths per rep is fine | The rep lasts longer than one breath — don't stretch one to cover it |
| True max-effort single (weighted, one-arm) | Brace with partial air, exhale past the sticking point | Torso rigidity for one rep — never a whole set, and not at all if the cautions above apply to you |
That fourth row catches people out. Slow negatives can take five or six seconds on the descent alone, and stretching one inhale to cover it is how beginners end up holding their breath on the exercise meant to be the gentle one.
Breathing mistakes that quietly cost you reps
- Going silent when it gets hard. The accidental hold. If you can't hear yourself breathing in the last third of a set, you probably aren't.
- Breathing into your neck. Shoulders rising toward your ears on each inhale usually means accessory muscles are doing work your diaphragm should be doing — less air for more effort.
- Dumping all your air at once. One explosive gasp at the start of the press leaves you empty for the second half of the rep. Spread the exhale across the whole ascent.
- Losing the brace on every inhale. Watch for hips that sag as you breathe in. Tension stays; only air moves.
A two-minute drill to lock the pattern in
Do this once, at a rep count that's easy for you — half of what you could actually manage — so you install the pattern while you still have the spare attention to think about it.
- Set up in your normal pushup position and brace: glutes tight, abs firm, body in one straight line.
- At lockout, empty your lungs, then start a slow breath in. Feel your lower ribs expand sideways rather than your shoulders rise.
- Lower for a two-count while continuing that inhale, reaching the bottom just as you finish breathing in.
- Press for a one-count while exhaling through pursed lips, out loud, so you can hear it.
- Finish the exhale exactly as your elbows lock. Finishing early means slow it down; still exhaling at lockout means start sooner.
- Repeat for eight to ten reps, then stop while it still feels easy — you're training the rhythm, not the muscle.
Run that drill at the start of two or three sessions and the pattern stops needing attention, which is exactly what you want when you're deep in a set and every bit of focus is going toward the next rep. And if you've been stuck at the same number for weeks, breathing is one of the cheapest variables to fix before rebuilding your whole program — the pushup plateau guide covers the rest.
