Last Updated on
Pull ups are a compound exercise – the workout utilises more than one muscle group – as a compound exercise it will give you more bang for your buck than an isolation exercises such as dumbbell curls. As a compound exercise it will naturally engage muscles sequentially stimulating you to produce testosterone which will lead to further strength gains. Pull ups, though hated by many, are amongst the king of exercises. All you require is a bar and you are good to go.
Working out with pull ups will improve your back strength, lats, shoulders, biceps, triceps, forearms and grip as they are all recruited in the exercise movement. Want to understand your progress – if you can do three chin ups you will probably manage a pull up, if you can do ten chin ups your probably good for five or so pull ups – the gains will happen to your pull up even if you only ever practice chin ups and vice versa.
The problem with pull ups is getting started and then progressing. Starting is often the hardest. If you have never engaged the appropriate muscles successfully it can be hard to engage the muscles for the first one. Additionally if you don’t have the basic upper body strength to complete a pull up after you have engaged the correct muscles you will never get a successful pull up as the starting point on which to build your endurance and develop “sets” of several pull ups at a time. With this in mind here are some useful techniques to get you going starting from been able to achieve no pull ups to doing sets and developing endurance and stamina :
Hangs
Yep that’s right “hangs” – if you can’t get one pull up or even a full chin up then you may as well go to the beginning and start with basic strengthening exercises. Start by hanging from your chosen bar. The name of the game here is to develop your grip strength and get some basic endurance in place. If you can’t hang for a period of time how can you stick together ten pull ups that may require you to hang for twenty to thirty seconds?
With hangs you will put all those pull ups muscles under gentle stress and tension. This will begin to wake those muscles up and develop some basic tone. Hanging is pretty hard straight off the bat so take encouragement as your air time improves.
You might notice that hanging from a thin bar is easier than hanging from a fat bar – it is, you need more grip strength for a bigger bar, so once you get a twenty second hang down increase the bar diameter with a towel and go for some additional grip strengthening.
No matter what you level hangs are always a good warm up and stretch to include in your pull up workout.
Negatives
OK, so you still haven’t got either a chin up or a pull up – although your hangs are developing. You can carry this next exercise out at the same time if you are a little bored of straight hangs or want to try and push on. Negatives – you know what these are but just don’t ordinarily consider them useful – but this technique can take you from underachiever to achiever.
Negatives, and this applies to many strength training exercises is the opposite movement to the impressive positive movement. Pulling the body upward during a pull up is the positive compression, relaxing the body through the down movement is the negative. Likewise, pushing out a squat is the positive movement as you compress muscles to lift, dropping into the squat is the negative.
Negatives are important because they can use as much as 75% of the strength required to carry out the positive movement. This means if you are not physically strong enough for the main event doing some negatives will work out the same muscles and help develop strength enough to get you there.
Negatives for chin ups or pull ups go like this – bounce yourself up into the full chin over the bar pull up position. Hold that position for 3-5 seconds and then lower yourself slowly and gradually to the bottom of the pull up movement or the start of the exercise. Simply hold then lower in a controlled manner. This is easier than doing a full pull up but will strengthen those same muscles so you can do the exercise the right way round in no time. Aim to do five negatives then rest for a few minutes and then do another set of five. Continue till negatives are easy, have a cheeky tester every now and again doing a normal pull up or chin up – you will probably surprise yourself within a week and find that actually you can do a pull up! If you find you get stuck in the dead hang at the bottom of the movement but can handle a pull up from a half way up position then try some negatives from that lower end of the movement rather than starting at the full chin over position.
Chin Ups
Maybe you can do a chin up but can’t do pull ups. For you, just add more chin ups and your first pull up will come. For all the other beginners chin ups are a good progression because they use slightly less back strength than a pull up but will still workout all the same muscles and get you to a pull up so after pull up negatives attempt chin ups. Chin ups are great for morale at the early stages because you can actually get going developing sets and feel some achieve safe in the knowledge the work in contributing to your pull ups.
Get to the point you can comfortably manage three chin ups in one set and you should be able to get at least one hard pull up from a complete dead hang. If getting three chin ups is tough don’t forget to work in negatives to boost strength and expect days to results not minutes…
Greasing the groove
So you got your first pull-up! Well done, now you have to grease the groove….basically get some muscle memory going and turn that pull up into an everyday occurrence. Greasing the groove goes like this, set up your pull up bar somewhere in your home that you walk past regularly. Now every time you walk past do a pull up. If you walk past three times do a pull up each time even if the time between your last pull up was short – if you walk past ten times in a day do the ten individual pull ups. What your are doing is getting your body more familiar with the move and effort but more importantly your suddenly doing some volume and developing strength and endurance – you only just got one, now your getting 3, 5 or 10 per day whatever it is is more than the zero you have been doing.
Additionally if you are already more advanced this additional volume trick can boost your number to even greater heights – maybe you can do a set of five, try greasing the groove with sets of three. Don’t go to failure but just look to significantly increase you daily volume – you’ll be busting through personal records in weeks with this technique. You can grease the groove every day without having rest days so you can really boost that weekly volume.
Ladders
Ladders are not for complete novices. You need rest days between workouts and ladders will take your to near max effort. They are good because they add volume and therefore strength and endurance but also they shake up your workout so you won’t get bored easy – additionally progress is often quite quick so you stay motivated. They have built in warm up and cool down phases and you will feel pushed to your max.
Ladders are where you complete sets in rising numbers so : set 1 = 1 pull up, set 2 = 2 pull ups, set 3 = 3 pull ups and so on…The ladder is the growing set size, you take a growing break between each set so if you do set 1 with 1 pull up you get ten secs rest to the next set, after set 2 you get 20 secs and so on. You basically go to your maximum set size, then come down the ladder by doing smaller sets :
set 1 1 pull up
set 2 2 pull ups
set 3 3 pull ups
set 4 4 pull ups
set 5 3 pull ups
set 6 2 pull ups
set 7 1 pull up
Total workout volume 16 pull ups.
Keep pushing out ladders and full sets of ten will happen in short time.
Weighted Pull Ups
Once you can do ten pull ups you have to ask where are you going with this? Practising bigger ladders and pushing for longer sets if fine……but time consuming. Once you have endurance for ten pull-ups the most effective way to get both your numbers and strength up is to go for weighted pull-ups. Adding weight to your routine will suddenly have you bouncing out big unweighted numbers. Add weight slowly to avoid stressing ligaments and build-up the numbers. Once you can get five out with an extra 20kgs of weight doing an unweighted pull up will seem like nothing in comparison.
Reply