Pushing Exercises & Pulling Exercises

In my last two posts I’ve discussed how I use pushing exercises and pulling exercises as part of my workout routine. When I do heavy weight low rep supersets, I like to pair a pushing exercise with a pulling exercise. When I do low weight high rep training to failure, I like to perform pushing exercises one day and pulling exercises another day. In this post, I wanted to quickly review a few different pushing exercises and pulling exercises that you can incorporate in your workout routine.

src: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bBBeTGVm88

What Are Pushing Exercises & Pulling Exercises

So what’s the difference between pushing exercises and pulling exercises? Pushing exercises are pressing motions that generally utilize your chest, triceps, and shoulders while pulling exercises emphasize your back, biceps, and shoulders. While it’s not the best way to gain strength, it’s convenient for me to superset a pushing exercise with a pulling exercise. This results in utilizing mostly differently muscles allowing other muscles to rest. When doing high rep training in order to gain muscle mass, I divide the exercises into one day of pushing and one day of pulling to create cumulative fatigue. Again, it’s very simple as I know what motions and muscles I’m targeting on any given day.

Below I’ve listed the pushing exercises and pulling exercises I’m currently doing as part of high rep training to failure. These are the same exercises I pair together for supersets when doing low rep strength training as well.

Pushing Exercises

  • Incline Press (2 sets)
  • Bench Press (2 sets)
  • Shoulder Press (2 sets)
  • One Arm Pushups
  • Handstand Pushups
  • Ring Dips
  • Ring Pushups
  • Dips
  • Decline Pushups
  • Kettlebell Military Press
  • Kettlebell Floor Press
  • Lying Triceps Extension
  • Seated DB Press
  • DB Flies
  • Triceps Kickback
  • Pushups

Pulling Exercises

  • Ring Pull Ups
  • Standing Curls
  • One Arm Ring Rows
  • Preacher Curls
  • Pull Ups
  • Incline DB Curls
  • Inverted Row
  • Renegade Row
  • Parallel Pull Ups
  • Kettlebell Clean
  • Kettlebell Row
  • Chin Ups
  • DB Rear Lateral Raise
  • Upright Row
  • Standing DB Hammer Curls
  • Bent Over Row
  • DB Front Lateral Raise
  • Clean
  • DB Side Lateral Raise

Again, these exercises take about 30 minutes to complete so I perform 4 minutes of Tabata kettlebell swings followed by 10 minutes of rowing to finish off the workout.

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