Claressa Shields is doubling down on her belief that men should be able to do 40 push-ups, and she’s not backing down from that standard. During an appearance on The Baller Alert Show, host Ferrari Simmons repeated her bold statement: “You’re not a real man if you can’t do 40 push-ups.” Shields didn’t hesitate to agree, responding with a simple, “True.”
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And if anybody thinks she’s asking men to do something she can’t do herself, the undefeated boxing champion has a message for them.“I hit 40 the other day…now if we competing, I get you at 60…do not challenge me.”
Shields made it clear that 40 push-ups might be the expectation, but once competition enters the picture, she’s ready to take things further.
The conversation got even better when Shields shared a story about challenging her younger cousins back home in Flint, Michigan. According to the boxer, the boys were around 12 to 14 years old at the time and feeling pretty confident about their strength.
She decided to put that confidence to the test.
Made to order and shipped to your door.
“I got like my little cousins from Flint,” Shields recalled, explaining how she challenged one of the boys to see who could do more push-ups.
But Claressa Shields wasn’t interested in making the challenge easy on herself. While her cousin used his palms, she decided to perform the push-ups on her knuckles, right there on the concrete.
“I got on my knuckles for that, and we got to going, and I did like 45 of them on my knuckles.”
And that decision came with a little battle damage.
“When we got up, my knuckles had been in the pavement, and it was like one of them was bleeding a little.”
Despite the bleeding, Shields said she finished 45 push-ups while her cousin gave up at around 39.
“He’s like, ‘Alright, you won.'”
She recalled that some of the other boys stopped much earlier, around 20, 25, or 30 push-ups. But the cousin who made it closest to her count still couldn’t pull off the win.
For Shields, the competition was just another opportunity to prove she could back up her confidence.
The Flint native is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and an undisputed boxing champion across multiple weight classes. She’s also spoken openly about growing up in boxing gyms where she trained alongside boys, completing the same workouts and conditioning drills.
That competitive mindset clearly doesn’t disappear when she leaves the ring.
And while plenty of people might disagree with using 40 push-ups to measure manhood, Claressa Shields seems perfectly comfortable standing by her opinion. She has her own expectations, and she’s apparently willing to challenge anybody who questions whether she can meet them herself.
As she summed it up during the interview, “I enjoy a challenge, period.”
