It rewinds your work, fast forwards to the fetched branch and applies your work on top of it. It doesn't create a merge commit, which can pollute your tree unnecessarily.
git fetch
git rebase origin/master
git pull
git pull --rebase
git checkout master # because it always matches upstream
git pull # this will always fast-forward
git merge foo
git push
Didn't know about `git pull --rebase`. Thanks for that.