Live the healthy training
Pull up yourself to strength.
get your first 10 pullups
Whether you can’t get your first pull up, or trying to crack double digits. Pull ups can be the most rewarding and challenging body weight workout. I can be incredibly challenging to obtain your first pull up and to get a new repetition can be equally as difficult.
In this article I want to give you an easy step by step guide to go from 0 pull ups to well on your way to 10 pull ups.
Firstly its important to know what muscles are used during a pull up so you know which muscles to make stronger.
The prime movers are the:
- Lats
- Biceps
- Mid & lower traps
- The core
It is important to know the muscles involved so you can also strengthen them outside of the scope of just pull up movements to have maximal result transfer and make them accumulatively strong to aid in doing a pull up.
Can’t do a pull up?
So you haven’t got your first pull up yet, no need to worry following this start program can get you your first pull up following a simple routine.
The most common problem with getting your first pull up is grip strength. If you can’t hold the bar you cannot pull yourself up. We will address this by doing an exercise called the Dead Hang. To do a Dead Hang it is as simple as grab hold of a bar and hang there. Aim for 30 – 60 seconds hold. You can practice this daily.
Once you become accustom to dead hangs you can start your back workout with Active Hangs. Simply going into a dead hang then activate by bringing your shoulders down and back and hold. Start with 3 sets of 10 seconds working up to 20 and 30 second holds. You can still practice your dead hangs every day, no such thing as to much grip strength.
Now that you have the bottom portion of the pull up done we will move on to the motion.
the Pull Up Negative. A very important stepping stone to getting your first pull up. You simply jump or step off at the top portion of a pull up and as slow as you can lower yourself to the ground. you will find that at the start you will drop quite fast. that is okay and your body will adapt. Start with 3-5 sets of 5 reps working up to a 5 – 7 second negative.
To further strengthen the Back muscles, namely the Traps and lats, and Biceps to aid with achieving your first pull up we will do the Australian Row. This exercise also known as the inverted row requires a bar or even a coffee table. You start by getting under the bar legs as straight as possible and in a horizontal pulling motion bring your chest to the bar. How bent your legs are dictates how hard the exercise will be. Start with 3 sets of 10 reps and work on straightening your legs.
Lastly we will build confidence and some more strength mainly through the top portion of the pull up by performing Banded Pull Ups. This exercise is a major confidence booster because you complete the whole motion of a pull up. To perform simply wrap a exercise band over the top of the pull up and and step into it. Then perform a pull up. To start with perform 3 sets of 5 and work at increasing the number of reps to build up strength.
The Workout.
Daily dead hangs of 30-60 seconds
- Active hang 3 x 10-30 seconds
- Pull up Negatives 3-5 sets 5 reps
- Australian Rows 3 sets 10 reps
Once you have build up strength you can replace Pull Up Negatives with Banded Pull Ups or add it to the workout.
Perform this workout 3 times a week for optimal results and be sure to add this to a complete workout to not grow muscular imbalances.
So you have a few pull ups and you feel like you can't progress.
Once you can do up to 5 pull ups we will introduce a method called greasing the groove. Greasing the Groove is a simple yet genius method of treating strength as a skill and training it regularly. Just like any thing else you wish to be good at you need to practice and a lot.
What is Grease The Groove?
Greasing the groove is taking an exercise you want to get better at and performing it several times a day at low reps. keeping the max reps you do to under 50 percent of your max. if you can do 6 pull ups perform no more than 3. And you will do it a lot. as often as possible while staying fresh. This modality strengthens your muscles neural pathways making you better at an exercise which in turn will help you to achieve more pull ups.
Sample GTG exercise.
Max reps of pullups 5
Every hour on the hour at home while awake person 2 pull ups for a fortnight. 1 day rest and test max. 1 day rest and continue GTG with the new max as your guide.
You do not need to do it per fortnight, whenever you feel like you have gotten stronger at the exercise.
An invaluable tool for GTG is a doorway pull up bar. being able to do a pull up each time you go through a doorway while increase total repetitions easily.
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Pull ups are so hard hope to get one soon.
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