I’m not buying it. 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."Given that, I had doubts about this particular pushup hack for women, but I figured I needed to give it a chance before passing judgment. Certainly it's fair to play around with different hand placements and decide which one works for you.

But is there really an anatomical difference that means women need a different hand placement in order to do their best pushups? Why women are being told to change their hand placement when doing pushupsI’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.)For an example, check out this video from Kayla Lee, who describes herself as a women’s anatomy and biomechanics instructor. You’ll notice there isn’t a strong connection presented between anatomy and the pushup hack; she even points out that the carrying angle isn’t a factor in the hand position we use for pushups, and the hand position she recommends has more to do with shoulder rotation. There’s no gender-related reason given that has anything to do with shoulder rotation.

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.

None of those points seem connected to me, and the more examples I found of this hack being explained online, the less any of it made sense. Why would the carrying angle affect your shoulder position or hand placement? Why is the carrying angle the most important thing to consider when choosing a hand placement?

Is the carrying angle even that different between men and women? I needed to dig deeper.What "carrying angle" actually meansAll 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.But if you read anatomy papers that discuss carrying angle, you'll see it's not exactly revelatory.

When you stand with your arms at your sides and your palms facing forward, your forearm and upper arm don’t form a straight line; your forearm is angled slightly away from your body, and this is your carrying angle. And it is slightly greater in women than in men, on average. It’s called the carrying angle because, at one point, it was hypothesized that it helps women’s forearms to avoid touching their hips as they carry things.

That idea didn’t pan out—it turns out the reason our arms don’t touch our hips while carrying groceries is that we deliberately hold our arms away from our bodies. 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.” Remember when I said that many supposed differences between men and women come down to factors like body size rather than sex or gender itself? The carrying angle seems to be a lot like the famous Q angle