Daily Life Movement Essentials: Upper Body Pushing

Derek Saffold • July 13, 2021
Man bench pressing with spotter in a gym. He's wearing a mask and gym clothes.

Upper body pushing is a part of our everyday lives.

While we all love the strong, sturdy look that push-ups, bench, or strict press can give us, it’s an essential part of moving in our life and can help build our body’s supportive structure. There are various ways to improve our upper body strength through working muscles like the chest, shoulders, triceps, biceps, upper back, and even our core. As we add resistance to our pushing, you can expect to have an added bonus of improving and maintaining our joint strength and bone density (which becomes more critical as we age!).

Today, we are talking all about pushing. Whether  we are pushing our bodies up off the floor, pressing an object and placing it on a shelf above our head, or just trying to push something away from our body, we are pushing. We use this movement daily and probably don’t even realize it, making pushing an essential part of our day. 

When we are pushing, we are using many different muscles to varying degrees. Depending on the direction, it will vary to what degree some muscle groups are used. Pectorals (chest) are responsible for most of our horizontal pushing while still playing a role in our vertical pushing (and more importantly, beach season!). Our deltoids (shoulders) are responsible for our vertical pushing while still playing a role in horizontal pushing. Our triceps assist in both vertical and horizontal pushing as they are the main drivers for our elbow extension.

Vertical Push

Athlete performing a seated dumbbell strict press.
Athlete performing a seated dumbbell strict press.

What is a vertical push? A vertical push is any exercise that pushes us away from an object or pushes the object away from us in a vertical path. Handstand push-ups, strict presses, and DB presses are all great examples of a vertical push.

Horizontal Push

Athlete performing a narrow grip bench press.
Athlete performing a narrow grip bench press.

Now that we’ve covered, vertical pushes, let’s talk about what a horizontal push is. A horizontal push is an exercise that pushes our bodies away from an object or pushes an object away from us in a horizontal fashion. A push-up or bench press are perfect examples of a horizontal press. 

Movement breakdown push-ups

Beginning phase of pushup

Set up

  • Set up with four points of contact: hands should be shoulder-width apart and directly under our shoulders.
  • The balls of our feet should be hip-width or narrower while maintaining a plank position to create a straight line from shoulder to ankle.
  • Begin with arms extended in a plank position –  we  should be able to draw a straight line from our ankles to our shoulders. 

Eccentric phase

  • Continue by lowering our chest and thighs to the ground while maintaining that straight line and keeping our elbows over your wrists.
Lowering portion of a pushup
End position of a pushup

Standing

  • When at the bottom of your push-up, drive your hands through the ground to return to the starting position.

Benefits of Upper Body Pushing

Why is upper body pushing so important? There are many benefits that can impact our day to day lives as well as our workouts. When we take the time to move with the correct form, we can expect to work multiple muscles such as your chest, shoulders, triceps, biceps, upper back, and even our core when we perform movements like the push-up. Pushing movements not only strengthen our muscles, but just like squats, they help build our body’s supportive structure. As we add more resistance to our pushing, we can expect to have an added bonus of improving and maintaining our joint strength and bone density.

As we age, our strength diminishes. This is why the importance of building a strong base before we start aging becomes more important with foundational movements. We want those situations in our lives to remain manageable as we age, training our chest, shoulders, and triceps will help us manage and  prepare ourselves as we get older.

Try this experiment!  

Lay flat on your stomach and then without the help of your arms, try to get yourself up to a standing position. With some difficulty, a few awkward movements, and maybe a few laughs, I’m sure you were able to manage to get yourself up. Why would we ever want this simple task to be this difficult? We wouldn’t.  This is just one example of why we should keep our muscles and joints healthy by taking ourselves through a full range of motion with the correct technique. Practice your movement and get stronger; your body will thank you for years to come.

Ultimus Training Cycle

By Derek Saffold • October 30, 2025
Hey R3VIVE Athletes, The Ultimus training cycle, going from November 10th to January 2nd, is our next training cycle! Functional Fitness will be launching into a blend of olympic lifts and diverse strength progressions. Including more intense conditioning and gymnastic strength and skill development. Functional Fitness: We're taking the solid foundations from all our Machine work (which we know you loved) in the Persist Cycle and launching into a blend of olympic lifts, foundational strength, and diverse strength formats. Prepare for tough but fun challenges, gymnastic strength and skill development, and an intensified focus that will push your limits and build your confidence further than you ever imagined! Build: This Build cycle is your blueprint for forging general strength with a rock-solid, consistent split. While we will have linear progressions of Front Squats, and Bench Press, we will also be embracing varied, dynamic strength orgressions. That will not only keep delivering results but also keep our strength fun. Our gymnastics focus will be on pure, raw strict strength, helping you build capacity with both external loads and the incredible power of your own bodyweight. Prepare to feel incredibly stable and powerful! Conditioning will focus on unleashing your engine, that we built in the Persist Cycle . We will Shift gears to a fastermore intense "for time" AMRAP and Chipper style workouts, moving beyond simple interval work and aerobic base building. These conditioning workouts will rotate dynamically throughout the week to maintain variety and deliver a fun and powerful exeriance. our cycle test, "Super Bario Bros.", is a chipper that will progressively challenge your kettlebell/dumbbell and gymnastics movements, demanding peak intensity and absolute confidence in your strength.

Persist Training Cycle.

By Derek Saffold • September 22, 2025
Hey R3VIVE Athletes, Our next programming cycle runs from September 15th to November 7th. It's an 8-week cycle that will continue to see strength progression carrying from what we did last cycle in Functional fitness. While Pump will begin working unilateral strength progressions. Functional Fitness: This cycle will continue our progression from the skill and lifts from last cycle, while trying to integrate them into more of our conditioning. We will do this by focusing on different portions of the lifts during our strength portion then performing smaller sets of gymnastic skills in our conditioning. You will also see conditioning that is purely focused on our aerobic capacity and working mainly on monostructural elements, such as running, rowing and biking. Build: This A-B week cycle is designed to build foundational strength through consistent progression, with a strong focus on Back Squats and Strict Presses, including variations for balanced weekly training. Conditioning will have some longer aerobic pieces and begin to include more skills like strict Toes-to-Bar, and Pull-ups from last cycle. See the chart below for details.
Man performing a barbell squat in a gym, wearing dark blue shirt and shorts.

Functional Fitness Training Block: Resurgence Cycle

By R3VIVE Fitness • July 23, 2025
Our next programming cycle runs from July 12th to September 12th. It's an 8-week cycle, so it's a bit shorter than the last one. We'll be bringing back some Olympic lifts and continuing with the A-B week progressions. The post Functional Fitness Training Block: Resurgence Cycle appeared first on R3VIVE FITNESS.
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