The Exercise We Used to Laugh At (And Why We Were Wrong)

Every coach has a list of exercises they’ve written off. Usually, it’s not based on careful analysis but on where they’ve seen the exercise done. The guy in the spandex tights at the globo gym. The bodybuilder in the cutoff sweatshirt. The person doing something that just looks wrong.

The feet-up bench press was one of those exercises. And it turns out, there are some solid reasons to reconsider it.

If you’d prefer to watch and listen to this conversation, you can do that here.

First, What We’re Actually Talking About

The standard bench press is a full-body lift. Your feet are planted hard into the floor, driving force up through your legs, through your torso, and into the bar. A foot coming up during a heavy press is a fault because it means you’ve lost a point of contact and, with it, a chunk of your power base.

The feet-up variation flips that intentionally. Ankles crossed, feet elevated, flat on the bench. No leg drive. No floor contact. Just you, the bar, and whatever your upper body can manage on its own.

That sounds like a downgrade. In some contexts, it is. But in others, it’s exactly the point.

Why It Makes Sense

When you remove your feet from the equation, a few things happen. You lose stability, so your upper-body stabilizers have to work harder to control the bar. Your trunk gets more involved. And without the assistance of leg drive, the pressing muscles have to do more of the actual pressing. The result is a variation that’s genuinely more demanding on the upper body, even if the load on the bar is lighter.

For athletes working around a low-back issue, this is a legitimate scaling option and a good one. Instead of pulling someone out of the lift entirely or sending them to a different corner of the gym, they stay in the rack with their training partners, lift their feet, and keep pressing. The back stays flat against the bench. The strain disappears. The training continues.

It also has a place for more advanced athletes looking to vary their pressing stimulus — different grip widths, different tools, even pre-competition cycles where the variation helps hone pressing mechanics before switching back to the full lift.

The More Important Point

Here’s the thing: this exercise got dismissed for years, not because anyone had evaluated it, but because of the context it usually showed up in. That’s a pattern worth paying attention to.

A lot of useful training ideas get buried under assumptions about where it came from. If the source is credible and the explanation holds up, it’s worth a fair look, regardless of whether it matches what you expected to hear. Keeping an open mind isn’t about abandoning your standards; it’s about not letting your ego make training decisions for you.

As CrossFit coaches, we pull from weightlifting, gymnastics, powerlifting, and more because good ideas about human movement don’t belong to any one methodology. The feet-up bench press came from powerlifters who were serious about what they were doing. The reasoning was sound. The application was clear.

That’s enough to put something in your toolbox. Give it a try. Use less weight than you think you need. See what it exposes. You might be surprised.

About the Author

Stephane Rochet is a Senior Content Writer for CrossFit. He has worked as a Flowmaster on the CrossFit Seminar Staff and has over 15 years of experience as a collegiate/tactical strength and conditioning coach. He is a Certified CrossFit Trainer (CF-L3) and trains athletes in his garage.