Mark Wahlberg and Dr. Oz have had a fitness feud brewing ever since last year over their disagreement about the necessity of eating breakfast.
(Wahlberg is #TeamBreakfast, while Dr. Oz is #TeamNoBreakfast, and is a fan ofintermittent fasting.) The two decided to settle the matter once and for all with an early morning workout that included a pushup contest that will air on The Dr. Oz Show—but they’ve been posting sneak peeks of how the contest went down.
Wahlberg showed up with a full stomach, having eaten breakfast.
And Dr. Oz posted a video on his Twitter, showing the two bantering.
“I gotta say, eating breakfast is a rookie mistake,” Oz says in the clip.
And in another clip, viewers get to see part of the pushup contest happening. And from the few seconds we saw, Oz’s form is terrible.
We’ll give Wahlberg a pass, because his first few reps weren’t so bad before he started shortening his movements to keep up with Dr. Oz, who is performing half-reps at best. The actor also has his arms in the proper position, too.
The exercise becomes more of a race of nodding heads than a pushup contest—and Wahlberg still wins using superior form. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since Wahlberg is an action star while Dr. Oz is a 59-year-old TV personality, but the win is still impressive given the form handicap.
If the doc really wanted perfect pushup form, he might have a tougher time bantering through a challenge, according to Men’s Health fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S.
“A pushup isn’t just a chest exercise. It’s a position of full body tension (or it should be). So start in a good plank: shoulders squeezed, glutes tight, abs tight,” he says.
And you should also be focused on squeezing your shoulder blades.
“One of the most common pushup mistakes is trying to hollow out your back,” says Samuel. “Doing so limits your ability to move your shoulders freely, and it’ll make the pushup a struggle. It can also lead to front shoulder issues, because every time you push up, you’re creating limited space for rotator cuff tendons to move between humerus and clavicle.”
But Dr. Oz’s biggest mistake came with his arms. Instead of keeping his elbows close to his body, he flares them out. Even worse, he only pushes himself halfway or even a quarter of the way up to the top position during the reps, cheating the contest.
While half or quarter reps have some use, if you’re going to call the move a pushup, you should do it right.
Wahlberg even calls him out at the end. “Oh, it took you a while to get to the top though,” he says as Dr. Oz strains to raise up to the top of a standard pushup for his last rep.
