Does the Push Up Pump Really Work?

The Push Up Pump is an at-home workout contraption that is supposed to provide more benefit than doing a standard push up. The idea is that it provides support and variation to the standard push up. But how does it stand up to real world use?

Overview
Fitness products for the home are super popular, especially when they can be tucked away in a closet or under the bed and forgotten about until the next time the urge to work out hits. Many times these products will overplay just how hard it is to exercise, and will trump up just how easy it becomes when you start using their product.

The Claim
The claims made by the Push Up Pump is that you can get a full body workout from it by doing what resembles a push up, but using the device to put you in the proper form and to add weight to your body weight. They say that with just 5 minutes a day spent on it you can get ripped and lean results. This is a pretty big stretch, considering that much of what is responsible for getting a ripped in lean look has to do with what you’re eating.

The Hype
The infomercial for this is responsible for the buzz surrounding it, and not so much positive word of mouth. They’ve done a good job of showcasing the major benefits, and of course they have fitness models showing it off. The subconscious message being sent is that if you use this machine long enough you will eventually resemble the models. It’s a classic bit of trickery that everyone uses, so you can’t really fault them for it.

They go a step further and expressly state that you can replace a gym full of equipment with the Push Up Pump, and that you can get a body like a fitness model. It’s best to keep your expectations reasonable and realize that these models spend all of their time looking the way they do, and many of them are following extreme eating and supplementation regimens to pull off the look.

The Cost
The Push Up Pump is listed on Amazon for $100

or you can get it at their official site for the same price and with 4 payments for $25. No matter how you cut it, it’s a decent price for a piece of exercise equipment. If it really could give you a full body workout, it would easily be worth it, and that’s how they make their sale, by making the case that you can hit all of your major muscle groups, even your legs.

The Commitment
Like anything that is promising you to get more fit you’ll have to get on the machine and use it as directed, for the amount of time per week they recommend. It might make push ups easier, or at least more effective, but you’ll still have to muster up the wherewithal to use this on a regular basis to see results. They say that 5 minutes per day is the breaking point, but we’re going out on a limb and saying that you’ll need to spend more time on it than that to see meaningful results.

Evaluation
The Push Up Pump has resistance bands so you could in essence do a weighted push up, with a variety of different hand grips so you’re working out different parts of your chest. There are also additional features to it that allow you to do dips and

While they show a leg extension as one of the machines you’ll no longer need, we couldn’t find a way to work out your quads and hamstrings while using this. You get some moderate tension in the legs by assuming a plank position to do the exercises, but no more so than simply holding a plank without the need of any machine. And this sort of tension does not rival the weighted lifts you do in the gym, so we’re chalking this up as a fail.

Before the dawn of the Internet this would have been one of those TV products that everyone bought, but didn’t have the ability to tell others about how well it works, outside of their immediate friends and family. But now we have the luxury of seeing what dozens or hundreds of others say about something, pulling back the curtain about how products really work once you get them home and unboxed.

Final Push Up Pump Review

The Push Up Pump gets mixed reviews from users, with the majority saying that while it’s good for some exercises, it’s not very good for others, and it falls short on the claim of a total body workout. For $100 you’ll want something that you can use a lot, and that hits all of your muscles. Something like the Total Gym does a better job of making sure that all of your major muscles get a resistance workout, while keeping you relatively comfortable on the bench.

Our Recommendation
While this does look pretty impressive when you first see it, and it would appeal to those that don’t really like doing push ups but feel that they should do them for how effective they are. But it doesn’t really help you do a push up, it’s designed to make them harder to do which would be a real turnoff for anyone that’s not a hard corps workout junkie.

What do you think? Does Push Up Pump work or not?