Part 3: Fundamental FitShot Exercise: Push-Up Technique

All right let's take a look at the fundamental fit shot exercise of the pushup. A pushup is a fundamental exercise because it's something that anybody can do regardless of your fitness level, regardless of the speed with which you do it. And maybe even regardless of your complete range of motion. Everybody can in some way do a pushup. What we're looking for is that they get down on the ground, get their chest to touch the ground, and then get their arms up straight.

And we'll look at a couple of ways we can scale that so that everybody can achieve chest on the ground and arms up straight and then get back to a standing position and take the shot. That'll be one rep of the pushup in context of fit shop. Now from a safety standpoint, one of the most important things to think about is how people are going to go down to the ground. So when we set our shooting line, of course we're usually going to be doing fit shot with multiple people, when we set our shooting line in place we want to make sure everybody's on the same page as far as where they're going to be when they do the pushup. We don't want some people going backwards, some people just diving forwards, and having some people potentially down range of another fit shop participant when they draw the gun and having that person way out in front of them like that.

So we want to make sure that what everybody's doing is standing on the line is exactly where your hands are going to be. So you're standing on the line where your hands are going to go. On your signal to begin your feet are going to go backwards. Just like they would if you were doing a burpee. Of course we could make these burpees, but right now it's a fundamental exercise, we're going to keep it as a simple pushup.

I'm going to drop my hands down to that line, moving my feet back, take my chest all the way to the ground, bring my arms all the way back to straight, bring my feet back up under me, drive out, take the shot, come back in, go to the holster. Again my feet are in the vicinity of that line, I look for the line, my hands hit the line. Chest to the ground, arms straight, come back up, drive out, take that shot. This exercise is one that can be done very quickly or very slowly. It can be very dynamic or it could be very slow.

We might have people who actually need to go down to kneeling, get their hands down on the line, keep their knees on the ground, get their chest down go to a straight arm, come back up, take the shot. And at this point they have completed a rep. Now they didn't do as much work as someone else who has a higher fitness level but it certainly still counts. We also might have people who, once they go down, they're going to get into a position here where they can go all the way down and then release their hands. This is the release pushup.

This will scale this up for a lot of people as far as the extra amount of work. So you have one person who's on their knees doing this, somebody else who's bringing their hands up and then coming back down and pushing up, getting up, taking the shot. This gives you a lot of different skill, a lot of different intensity levels, for the different people that are going to be on your line. That's one of the great things about fundamental fit shot exercises is that they are scalable and everyone can do them. So remember next time you're out doing your fit shot, you want to work fundamental exercises first, especially if you have varying degrees of fitness in your group the push-up is a great exercise.