About 110 seconds β€” 1:50 β€” for a man. That is the median of the only two published samples of plank times I can find, and both landed on 110 exactly. If you want a standard with an institution behind it, the US Army grades the plank by age: the pass mark is 1:30 at 17-21 and 1:10 from 37 on, with a perfect score at 3:20 β€” a scale cut from 630,000 real test results. Which makes the numbers on page one a problem. Harvard Health puts a useful plank at 10 to 30 seconds. The by-age charts filling the rest of the results page top out around a minute for a man over 40. The 10th percentile of the male dataset is 62 seconds. The benchmark the internet hands you is the bottom tenth of the only group anyone measured. The honest limit, stated up front: both datasets are college students in their early twenties, there is no representative adult sample broken out by decade, and the Army table describes soldiers, not the public.

How long can the average person plank?

The median man holds 110 seconds. The median woman holds 72. Both sit well above what the internet tells you to aim for.

The spine of this is Strand, Hjelm, Shoepe and Fajardo (2014), "Norms for an Isometric Muscle Endurance Test," in the Journal of Human Kinetics β€” 471 people, 194 male and 277 female, the men averaging 20.4 years and 81.1 kg, with 109 NCAA varsity athletes and 361 non-varsity. The overall mean hold was 100 Β± 63 seconds. Men averaged 124 Β± 72; women 83 Β± 63. Varsity athletes 123 Β± 69; everyone else 83 Β± 63.

Male percentiles, in seconds:

  • 10th β€” 62. A 60-second hold does not reach this line.
  • 20th β€” 79
  • 30th β€” 89
  • 40th β€” 97
  • 50th β€” 110. The median.
  • 60th β€” 122
  • 70th β€” 137
  • 80th β€” 157
  • 90th β€” 201

Female percentiles, in seconds: 10th 35, 20th 48, 30th 58, 40th 63, 50th 72, 60th 84, 70th 95, 80th 108, 90th 142.

The protocol is why those numbers are worth quoting. Elbows directly beneath the shoulders, humerus perpendicular to the floor, forearms neutral, hands in front of the elbows, only forearms and toes supporting the body. The test ended on a voluntary stop, on adverse symptoms, or on form failure β€” specifically when "two consecutive corrective cues given to the participant did not result in an adequate correction in form." That is a judged hold with a defined end point, not a number somebody typed into a survey.

Then the line nobody on page one has found. A second group β€” Chase, Brigham, Peterson and Coste (2014), "Fitness Norms for the Plank Exercise" β€” timed 102 collegiate participants aged 18 to 25, self-described athletes at a different school. Male mean: 117.66 Β± 53.49 seconds, with the 25th percentile at 84 and the 75th at 135. Male median: 110 seconds. The same number, to the second. Women there averaged 106.15 Β± 49.52, median 95. Two independent samples, two campuses, one median. Replication that clean is rare in field testing.

Now the honest label. Both samples are twenty-year-olds, and heavily athletic ones at that. A college sample is not a population, so read 110 as the best available benchmark, not the average of all men. And even a good field test is a proxy, not a prescription β€” the same caution applies to how many pushups you should be able to do. The number tells you where you sit. It does not tell you what to train.

Is there an official plank standard?

Yes, and it is age-graded β€” which makes the plank unusual. Most bodyweight holds have nothing behind them at all.

The US Army Fitness Test scoring scales, approved 15 May 2025 and effective 1 June 2025, score the plank (PLK) as a graded event. Minimum for a passing 60 points, then the 100-point maximum:

  • 17-21: 1:30 to pass, 3:40 for 100. (2:02 scores 70, 2:35 scores 80, 3:08 scores 90.)
  • 22-26: 1:25 to pass, 3:35 for 100.
  • 27-31: 1:20 to pass, 3:30 for 100.
  • 32-36: 1:15 to pass, 3:25 for 100.
  • 37-41, and every bracket above it up to 62+: 1:10 to pass, 3:20 for 100.

What makes that table more than a military rule: Army Times reported in March 2022 that the scales were built from "the 630,000 ACFT scores that we've collected," supplemented by scoring scales from other US military branches, "particularly for the plank." The 100-point maximum was set at the 96th percentile within each age and gender cohort, and the minimum at the 5th percentile. So 1:10 is built to sit near the bottom of a soldier's distribution and 3:20 near the top. One caveat the same quote hands you: the plank scales in particular leaned on other branches' tables, so the Army never published the exact percentile behind 1:10. It is still the only age-graded plank scale anywhere, sitting in a PDF on army.mil while every fitness site invents its own. The plank is also what the Army, the Navy and the Marines swapped the sit-up out for, which is why there is no longer an official answer to how many sit-ups you should be able to do.

It has not moved either. The March 2022 ACFT scale carries an identical plank table, value for value β€” three years, two test names, same numbers. Settled, not provisional.

One detail worth pausing on: the male and female columns for the plank are identical at every age and every point value. On the same card, the 17-21 deadlift maxes at 340 lb for men and 220 lb for women. The card gives no reason for it. The likely one: core endurance does not scale with body size the way absolute strength does.

Compare that to how long you should be able to dead hang, where there is no published norm, no military scale and no dataset β€” just coaching standards wearing a table's clothes. The plank has two measured samples and a scale cut from 630,000 tests. Thin by the standards of real science. Enormous by the standards of bodyweight benchmarks.

What the plank does not have is an ACSM norm. And the research battery people usually cite here β€” McGill's torso endurance tests β€” does not use the front plank at all. It uses a trunk flexor test, a side bridge and the Biering-SΓΈrensen extensor hold, and it cares far more about the ratios between them than about any single absolute time.

How long should a 40 year old be able to plank?

1:10 to pass, 1:42 for 70 points, 2:15 for 80, 2:47 for 90 and 3:20 for a perfect score. Those are the Army's numbers for the 37-41 bracket, and here is the part that breaks every chart you have seen: the scale stops decaying at 37. A 42-year-old, a 51-year-old and a 61-year-old are all held to 1:10 and 3:20. The curve flattens and then runs level to the end of the card.

That is what the invented by-age tables get wrong: they draw a smooth decline the real age-graded data does not show. SOLE Fitness walks every decade by sex and cites nothing at all: 1:45 for men aged 30-39, 1:00 to 1:15 for men 40-49, 20 to 30 seconds for everyone over 60. Look where those land: the 30-39 male figure sits below the measured male median of 1:50, and the 40-49 range brackets the Army's 1:10 pass mark. The numbers are not crazy. They just have nothing underneath them.

Marathon Handbook is the most honest page ranking for this question, and it still publishes numbers with no origin: its by-age table is attributed to WebNews21, a content aggregator, and the page itself concedes that "it is unclear how this data was sourced" and that "there aren't a lot of plank time statistics or studies that show the average plank time by age." That admission is doing more work than the table above it.

I am 37, so I am the first year of the bracket where the curve stops moving β€” a convenient place to sit, and also a reminder of how blunt these scales are. I lift four days a week on a push, pull, legs, upper split, three sets of 8 to 12 reps at one to two reps in reserve. A timed plank is not in the program. It is a test I would use to check on the core, not a session.

Is a 2 minute plank good? And is there any point going past it?

Yes, 2 minutes is good. 120 seconds sits between the 60th percentile (122 seconds) and the 70th (137) of the published male sample, and it scores roughly 75 points out of 100 on the Army scale at 37-41. Good, not rare.

Whether to chase more clock is a different question, and this is where page one gets confused. Harvard Health writes that "most experts suggest anywhere from 10 up to 30 seconds is plenty" β€” a sentence the article attributes to nobody. Its named expert, physical therapist Eric L'Italien of Spaulding Rehabilitation, says something narrower: "focus on doing multiple sets of smaller amounts of time," and "two minutes is often considered the maximum, and you don't get much more benefit after that."

That is not a contradiction of the Army or the two studies. It is a different kind of claim. Harvard is prescribing a training stimulus β€” how to use the plank in a program. The Army and the researchers are measuring what people can do β€” a test. The entire mess on this keyword comes from pages quoting a prescription as if it were a measurement, then telling a healthy adult that 30 seconds is the standard when 30 seconds does not reach the 10th percentile.

For the ceiling, Guinness World Records has Josef Ε Γ‘lek of the Czech Republic at 9 hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds in Pilsen on 20 May 2023, taking the record from Daniel Scali's 9:30:01. Small correction while we are here: that Harvard page still says the record is "more than four hours," which is over five hours stale. Even good sources go stale.

The practical read: past about 2 minutes, adding seconds mostly measures boredom tolerance. Add load and leverage instead β€” a plate on your back, elbows walked forward for a long lever, or one foot off the floor. Harder in 45 seconds beats easier in four minutes.

Do planks give you abs?

No. Not on their own, and not mostly.

A plank is an isometric anti-extension hold. It teaches the trunk to resist extension under load, which carries over to heavy squats, carries and presses. But visible abs are two separate things stacked on each other, and the plank barely touches either. The first is body fat: abs start to show under roughly 15% and are clear at 10-12%, and no amount of holding a position changes that number β€” a plank burns almost nothing. The second is rectus abdominis size, and an isometric hold at bodyweight, with no progressive load, drives very little muscle growth.

Which is why I do not train abs with timed holds. My ab work is cable crunches, machine crunches and weighted decline sit-ups β€” 2 to 3 sets of 6 to 12 reps, twice a week, with the load going up over time. Same rules as everything else in the program. If you want the muscle to grow, you have to load it and add weight to it, and the plank has no obvious way to do that at the rep ranges muscle responds to. The training side of that is the four exercises that actually show your abs.

The other half is body composition, and for most men it is the half that decides everything. I went from 285 lbs to about 200 and hold it year-round, and under roughly 15% is where the muscle you built starts being visible at all. That is the whole two-dial idea behind the Abs Protocol β€” reveal the muscle, build the muscle. Only doing one of them is why so many people can hold a three-minute plank and still cannot see a thing.

How do you increase your plank time?

Several submaximal sets, not one hold to failure β€” Harvard's own recommendation. Three or four sets at a comfortable 45 to 60 seconds, a few times a week, accumulate far more total time under tension than one miserable max effort, and they do not wreck your form, which is what ends most sets anyway.

Retest once a month, not every session. And past roughly 2 minutes, stop buying seconds: add a plate, lengthen the lever, or take a limb off the floor.