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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The post Daily Life Movement Essentials: Upper Body Pushing appeared first on R3VIVE FITNESS.

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Apex Training Cycle

By Derek Saffold • December 26, 2025

Hey R3VIVE Athletes, The Apex training cycle, going from January 5th to April 3rd, is our next training cycle! This will be the firt training cycle of the new year! this is a chance to refocus and get in some good work to help you reach your goals! lets all work together to crush this training cycle! Functional Fitness: The Apex Cycle is designed to make your year-long strength work truly functional, focusing on controlled, powerful movements, complexes under fatigue, and mandated touch-and-go reps to prepare you for mixed-modal workouts. Our strength culminates in the classic CrossFit Total and the "R3VIVE Other Total," while conditioning features a wide variety of time domains, movement volume builds (like wall balls, toes-to-bar, and burpees), and regular Friday retests of past workouts to track your progress and ensure you perform your absolute best. Build: Designed to bring together all your training from the past year and prepare you for your strongest performance yet. Our strength work will focus on controlled, powerful movements, building you up to test your limits with both the classic CrossFit Total and the "R3VIVE Other Total," which challenges your skill and strength balance. Expect a well-rounded program including unilateral strength, skill work, and core stability, with dedicated days for deadlifts, squats, gymnastics, and varied accessory work to keep you healthy and constantly progressing. For conditioning, we're tailoring the work to challenge you in new ways, featuring a wide variety of time domains and movements, and a specific volume build on common movements like wall balls, toes-to-bar, and burpees. Instead of a standard test/retest, we'll be performing regular retests of past workouts on Fridays, allowing you to easily track your progress and see how far you've come. Our weekly template balances intensity—with short, fast metcons on Mondays—with recovery, incorporating lower impact endurance work on Thursdays, and a strategic taper toward the end of the week to set you up for success on Friday! Partner workouts will wrap up your week every Saturday, bringing the whole community together.

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.

Daily Life Movement Essentials: Upper Body Pushing