The Path To Your First Pull-up
Pull-ups are a fantastic upper body strength and muscle developer. They are an expression of relative strength, which means strength relative to your body weight. To truly excel at them, you need two things: great upper body pulling strength and relatively low body weight. For many folks, only one of those elements are standing in their way. For most, it’s probably both.
To immediately address the elephant in the room, some people will already be operating at a disadvantage when attempting to do their first pull-up. Anyone that naturally carries more body fat and has a relatively weak upper body will have an uphill battle. Many women may find pull-ups especially difficult due to carrying extra, but necessary, sex-specific body fat and having less upper body muscle mass than men.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible!
So there are two parts here: minimizing weight and maximizing upper body pulling strength. I’ve already covered the first part in a series of articles on fat loss that start here, so we will be focusing on the second part in this article.
Increasing Pulling Strength
Strength is specific, which means you need to train it in the way that you plan to express it as much as possible. Pull-ups are a skill as well as the primary method for building “pull-up muscles”.
Having said that, building a general reservoir of pulling strength and muscle can translate to better pulling capacity. So let’s take a look at what we can do if we’re not quite ready for pull-ups, or maybe even their regressions.
What If I Can’t Do A Pull-Up or Chin-Up Yet?
It’s possible to increase your pulling strength independent of pull-ups and chin-ups with exercises like rows and pulldowns. So adding either of these to your program will increase the strength and size of your back muscles and lats, which can translate to stronger pulling.
Here are some of my favorite non-pull-up exercises you might want to throw into your program:
Machine Lat Pulldown (this one is not me, as you may have realized)
Rows are horizontal pulls, meaning the direction of pull is perpendicular to the body. So rows don’t technically mimic the pull-up or chin-up, but they’re still great at increasing overall pulling strength. Cable and machine lat pulldowns have pull directions that directly mimic the pull-up/chin-up, so it’s probably a good idea to get strong on these.
How many sets of these you can handle will be highly individual, but I aim to do 16-20 sets of pulling exercises a week. So this is how that might be broken down based on the number of days you’re working out:
Note: These aren’t the whole workout. I’m just showing how pulling exercises might be distributed.
2 Days of Pulling
Day 1
Dumbbell Single Arm Row on Bench 4 x 8-10e
Cable Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12
Day 2
Machine Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12
Machine Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10-12
3 Days of Pulling
Day 1
Dumbbell Single Arm Row on Bench 4 x 8-10e
Cable Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12
Day 2
Machine Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12
Machine Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10-12
Day 3
Dumbbell Incline Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10
If you wanted to add another exercise here you could
Note: You may have noticed that I grouped vertical and horizontal together so there is less overlap. Doing two horizontal or two vertical pulling exercises in the same workout is redundant and the effect of the second exercise will be diminished.
If you train more frequently, you can break these exercises up more. For instance, if you train five days/week, you could do one pulling exercise per day (this is what I currently do).
The goal with these exercises, like any exercise, is to improve some aspect of them over time. Aim to “get stronger for reps”, which means you want a double focus on improving weight and reps. Having two variables to manipulate gives you more flexibility in how you progress. This system is called double progression, and it might look something like this in practice.
Once you feel like you’re ready to move onto pull-ups/chin-ups and their regressions, you’ve got some options. As I mentioned before, pulling strength is specific, so when you’re ready for these, they’ll supplant other pulling exercises in your workouts.
Getting Started With Pull-Up Regressions
If you can’t do an unassisted pull-up or chin-up, you’ve got a handful of options. These are the best, in my opinion:
This is the gold standard of pull-up regressions, because the movement is the same and you can incrementally decrease the assistance. Even if you can do pull-ups, these can be a great addition to your pulling routine due to the control they allow you to achieve in the movement.
Increase the difficulty by decreasing the weight of the assistance.
Loop one end of a band around the pull-up bar and either loop the other end around your feet or knee (depending on how much help you need), or you can stretch the band flat on hooks in a rack if you’d rather stand on the band instead.
Increase the difficulty by using a smaller band or placing the band on the knee rather than the foot.
Jumping pull-ups are essentially pull-ups with the aid of a jump. You jump and pull yourself to the top position of the pull-up, then try to lower yourself under control.
These are great because you can do them in rapid succession, but your goal should be to minimize the contribution from the jump.
Increase the difficulty by using less of a jump over time, adding reps, or by adding some form of external weight that won’t swing around while you’re jumping.
The eccentric phase of the pull-up is the part where you’re lowering toward the ground.
You can use a step or box to put you at the top position. Then you can either lower completely to the ground or by bending your knees while still on the box.
Increase the difficulty by going slower, doing more reps, or combining them with another of the listed regressions.
The rep schemes for each of these will be different but the goal is the same as with the other pulling exercises. Start with a set and rep scheme that’s doable and find ways to make it harder over time.
For example, you might start with one of the exercises listed above for three sets and progress to doing two or three of the exercises at four sets each after a couple months.
Okay we’ve talked about improving our pulling strength and adding in pull-up and chin-up regressions, so now let’s talk about improving once we’re actually able to do a pull-up/chin-up.
Getting Better At Pull-Ups
It’s time to make the distinction between chin-ups and pull-ups.
Everyone has different naming conventions, but I view a pull-up as pulling yourself over a bar using an overhand grip, while a chin-up involves pulling yourself up with an underhand grip. The chin-up also tends to be more bicep and forearm-heavy and the pull-up tends to do a better job targeting the back.
I often switch between pull-ups and chin-ups because:
The slight differences lower the risk of overuse injuries
It can make training slightly less boring
You can target more muscle mass
There is no secret here, if you want to get good at pull-ups (or chin-ups), you have to do them. You may be able to get better at pull-ups only doing them once per week, but that’s not going to cut it for most people. I generally have my clients perform pull-ups (or pull-up regressions) at least twice per week. So it may look like this:
Day 1
Pull-Ups/Pull-Up Regression 3-4 sets x As Many As Possible (AMAP) Unbroken RIR 1
AMAP Unbroken means as many reps as you can do without stopping, and an RIR (Reps in Reserve) of 1 means stopping 1 rep short of muscular failure. So if you could have done 4 reps, you would stop at 3.
Day 2
Chin-Ups/Chin-Up Regression 3-4 sets x AMAP Unbroken RIR 1
Note: You can take your last set of pull-ups or chin-ups to complete failure (RIR O) since fatigue will have little effect at that point.
Once you’re able to do a pull-up or chin-up, progression becomes a little more interesting. We’re still a long way from being able to add external resistance, so how do we increase the difficulty over time?
I like to take what I call the pool approach. Essentially, you combine all the reps across your sets and try to improve that number. So if you get 3 sets of 3 reps, you’d have 9 reps. Your goal would be to increase to 10 or 11 next time.
Being able to get 1 pull-up is a huge milestone, and it will make getting more easier. But it certainly won’t be easy. Because you need a certain number of reps to stimulate growth, doing 3 sets of 1-2 reps won’t spur much change. So while you’re painstakingly trying to increase your reps by 1 or 2, you may want to keep other pull-up regressions in your program to add volume.
Here’s an idea of what progression might look like for pull-ups/chin-ups in a program:
Week 1
Pull-ups 2,1,1,1
Chin-ups 2,2,1,1
Week 2
Pull-ups 2,2,2,1
Chin-ups 2,2,2,2
Week 10
Pull-ups 5,5,4,4
Chin-ups 6,6,5,4
Week 16
Pull-ups 8,8,8,8
Chin-ups 9,9,9,8
You get the idea. It may not look exactly like this for you, but as long as you’re diligent, they will improve. And hopefully this gives you an idea of the timeline you’re working with. It often takes at least several months after getting your first pull-up to get to the point where you can crank them out.
Adding External Resistance
There is no hard and fast rule regarding the optimal time for adding external resistance. Some say 10 reps, some say 15 reps, but the answer is always going to be arbitrary.
I personally think waiting until 15 is too long, so 10 works well for most folks, but you could do it before then too if you want to accelerate things. What I can say is that adding external resistance to pull-ups is where the real fun begins for a couple reasons:
The number of body weight reps you can do will increase significantly with this new stimulus. Simply trying to do more reps is a tough road to progression, so being able to add weight again is a huge boost.
You can once again go back to increasing the weight incrementally. If you keep the reps stable, you can increase the load by 5 pounds or so depending on what you use to load your pull-ups.
How to Load Pull-Ups
There are different ways to add resistance to pull-ups and each has pros and cons. I won’t go into excruciating detail about this, because quite frankly, it doesn’t matter all that much.
Find a way to add resistance that suits you and make it more difficult over time. Here are the main options:
Dip belt - This is my preferred method because it’s relatively cheap and flexible. You can thread the chain on the belt through plates and kettlebells or wrap it around dumbbells.
Weight vest - These are a little pricier, but they tend to be a little more out of the way than the dip belts. Having said that, it’s harder to adjust the resistance, which makes them less useful in my opinion.
Weighted backpacks and chains - I’m only mentioning these because they’re options, but I generally wouldn’t use them. Both can be found on Rogue’s website and may be slightly different than the two mentioned above, but the downsides far outweigh the benefit or novelty of using them in my experience.
Pull-ups with external resistance can be treated like normal gym exercises in that you can now increase the weight, reps, or both.
A word of caution on pull-ups with external resistance: pull-ups can already be taxing on the joints, but with extra weight added they can be downright brutal, especially to the elbows. So make sure you don’t increase the weight too quickly and/or do too much volume throughout the week as elbow issues can linger for a very long time and seriously disrupt training.
Summary
Pull-ups are a highly sought-after badge of honor for good reason. They are an excellent display of relative strength and fantastic muscle-builders. To truly excel at them, you need excellent pulling strength and relatively low body weight.
Hopefully you’re now armed with the road map to improving them. It’s a long journey, but well worth it. If you have any other questions about pull-ups or any other fitness or nutrition-related topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me in the comments here or email me at bo@stansellfit.com.