Pull Up Progression

Pull ups are hard. Getting your first pull up may seem impossible, but once it happens, progress gets much faster. Here is a little progression to get better at strict pull ups. Lets start at zero – the furthest away we could be from getting a pull up. We need to build our strength in relationship to our body weight. The first obvious way to improve that ratio is to lose weight, and we can work on that outside of the gym. Oh wow, the answer again is diet and exercise. In the gym, we need to build those pulling muscles. We can do that with any pulling exercise. Try it all. Bent over rows, lat pull down, band pull down, ring rows, T bar row, face pulls, pull up negatives, scapular pull ups, banded pull ups, pull up negatives, jumping pull ups, or anything else along those lines. The main way we build muscle is through time under tension. That means volume – whether it is through reps or time (as in a negative done much slower or a static hold in a position). When we do any of these movements, we should do them for higher reps and with control to get the most out of it. Once we start to build that muscle we need to learn how to use it. Later, we’ll get more specific to the pull up. Performing a chin up will be a little easier than a pull up, so that will come first. Once we can do one strict chin up, awesome, things get much easier from there. We’ll do a bunch of sets of one chin up and accumulate those reps doing one or two a day until we start doing maybe five to ten a day throughout our work out, and before we know it, that adds up to 200 a month. On top of that, we can still continue with the other pulling we were doing. We’ll be able to do more and start doing sets of two or three. We can mix pull ups and chin ups into this as we get better at them. That’s the basic idea – to making progress on pull ups. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated and structured to a T. Just pull a bunch and you’ll get better at pulling. If you can’t seem to make progress, try other variations that you may not have tried before. Along with that, if there is a pulling exercise you don’t like and don’t feel a benefit from, then don’t do it. There are plenty of other exercises out there. Don’t be afraid to keep attempting strict pull ups and failing them each time. You might find you get a little closer until you surprise yourself.