Soulman asked me to consolidate some information about pullups into a thread with an eye toward beginners (0 pullups).

First, some definitions:

Pullup: hanging from bar with arms extended to chin over. Don't care about grip or body english - just get your chin over the bar.
Chinup: refers to a supinated grip.
Kipping pullup: Here is a video of a kipping pullup http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV2Fiz0_B28. You can also do "butterfly" kipping pullups. If this thread turns into a debate about whether kipping pullups are cheating, or look stupid, I will ****ing murder all of you. This subject has been beaten to death and nobody cares.

Pullups in any form are awesome. They require almost no technique or equipment and are fun to do. They work your arms and back making you look pretty and are about as "functional" as an exercise can get (especially if you remember being a child and climbing all over **** every day). But, untrained beginners and fat people (despite being able to do amazing things) often cannot do a single pullup. How can you train something if you physically can't do it?

There are two general ways you can get to the point of that first strict pullup (and then you're off to the races):

Assisted pullups:
-gravitron
-bands
-someone pushing up on your ass
-kipping (my favorite)

And Negatives.

There are basically two groups of people that can't do pullups in my mind. Those that are very fat and detrained such that the very act of hanging onto a bar is extremely difficult, and those that just don't have enough strength to get a single pullup (healthy weight detrained folks, and fat trained folks).

For the first group the only real option imo is the gravitron (putting 100lb+ tension on a band that could slip and smash into a trainee's face doesn't seem like a good idea to me). Set the assistance so that the trainee can do 3-8 pullups in a set and just linearly progress from there.

For the 2nd group, negatives, band assist (or gravitron), and kipping/"cheat" pullups are the way to go.

Gravitron - Good place to start as with really overweight/weak individuals. Do the same thing, except this time work on negatives too...

Negatives - All my trainees that can't do a pullup will at some point do these. If they can jump their bodyweight up to chin over do that, otherwise give them a boost. Start by having themselves lockout at the top and simply try to stay on the bar as long as possible. Often after a couple weeks they will become fairly strong at the top of the movement, in which case make them come down quickly to just above their sticking point and hang out there as long as possible. Do 5-10 singles a workout - I usually have people do them between squat sets while we're at the rack. For normal weight individuals, a couple weeks of this training once or twice a week should allow them to progress to...

Kipping pullups - Teach them how to swing, and instruct them to do everything possible to get up and over the bar. Being able to hold a negative for 10+ seconds usually is enough strength to get a single kipping pullup. Train these from now on in concert with negatives until the trainee can do 1 strict pullup. From then on, do both kipping and strict pullups for the rest of their life.

An example: My gf started training with me in July of '09. She was very weak but not overweight - she tried a pullup but couldn't even bend her arms. For the next month we trained them 3-5 times/week. This is a minimum for all you guys, for my paying clients we obviously do them less often.

First three weeks - negatives and practicing the kipping pullup swing.

Next two weeks - first kipping pullups, did singles then doubles then triples, plus negatives.

~1 month after starting training - first strict chinup. Alternated strict chinup workouts with kipping pullup workouts. Adding ~1rep/week for 8 weeks until getting 19 kipping pullups in a set and 10 strict chinups. Now she does kipping pullups and weighted strict chinups for sets of ~5.

Despite being hard for you weak and fat people, there's no excuse for not working on them. Everyone I've trained that couldn't do a pullup and subsequently got them was super pumped.

Excellent post Smiley, thanks for doing this <3 <3

Some questions:

1) You mention using the Gravitron for weak individuals as well - do you mean they also should do e.g. 3 sets of 3-8 reps in addition to negatives in order to advance quickly to kipping/strict chins?

2) Any advice on how to best incorporate this into SS once you get to the 2-4 rep range? I could either see adding 2-3 sets as assistance in addition to everything else, or more sets as an exercise in itself (per the advanced version of SS where DLs/PCs/chins are alternated).

3) What's the advantage of doing kipping pullups for a high number of reps like your gf (19), as a metcon? I'd imagine the carry-over to weighted pull-ups to be rather small for strength purposes?

Great thread. I for one am very weak and would like to get super pumped about actually doing real pullups for once in my life.

Question.

I'm doing a SS variant where I do A:squat, bench, pullup and B:squat, press, pullup. I've been skipping deadlifts cause of past back problems, but I'm considering adjusting the program to deadlift every other workout now and see how it goes. If that goes well I'll also add pc's.

But I suck at pullups. Should I just continue doing 3 sets of those at the end of every workout, even when I deadlift? Right now I'm doing jump-up-and-negative, 3 sets of 10, although I can only manage like 10, 6, 4 or something in that range.

And, is it enough for me to be doing them 3 times a week. I don't want to mess with the recovery for SS.

1) If you have access to it, sure. They are less demoralizing than negatives. One of my trainees still hasn't got his first pullup after a couple months of negatives (he likes to eat and loves squatting) so we're working with the gravitron too.

2) GTG several days a week away from the gym (think singles everytime you walk under the bar you have at home) or just treat them like any other foundational exercise. 3 sets of x, 2 or 3 times a week. The thing you need to avoid is being paranoid about adding volume and "messing up your recovery" for other stuff. They're important, and doing half a dozen here or there isn't going to immediately strip pounds off your press.

3) I think reps of anything past 10 are going to be primarily for metcon purposes. There will be some carryover to strength, but not a whole lot like you said. Being able to do 20 (or 30 or 100) pullups is more just "fun" than anything else.

alternative:
do rows & deads
???
???
???
lats and arms get stronger and u can do chins now

I think kipping PUs will only get you in the neighborhood of ~0-1 deadhang PUs. For a while, I could kip for up to 5 or so PUs and still had just one deadhang PU. I got more deadhang PUs (and stronger) by adding banded PUs in the 3x10 or so range. Bonus: stronger at deadhangs meant I also added capacity to my kipping PUs, which is great for metcons.

maybe i'm just ******ed, but i have no clue how to kip a pull up. it makes no sense when i'm hanging on the bar.

With regard to bands, you don't have to spend a lot of money. I bought a couple of $5 26" bicycle inner tubes from WalMart for my son, and he uses these as assistance bands for his chin ups. I first had him doing 5 sets of 3, then each workout, add another rep, so it's:

workout 1: 3,3,3,3,3
workout 2: 4,3,3,3,3
workout 3: 4,4,3,3,3
...
workout 6: 4,4,4,4,4
workout 7: 5,4,4,4,4
etc.

When he gets to 5 sets of 5, I'll have him use just one tube instead of 2 and start at 5x3 again. Then hopefully work up to no bands.

It is skill-intensive, obviously.

Smiley,

Good article. As you know, your advice helped me rather rapidly, though I suspect that concentrating on rows and DL variants also helped quite a bit as well.

It's important to note that the jumping and band-assisted pull-ups felt like a giant waste of time to me, but I kept doing them. Eventually it made a huge difference.

The best thing that I did to get a full pullup was to get a doorway pullup bar so I could do jump/negative/shorter ROM pullups whenever I wanted.

I basically did them every other day and did a ton of volume. Eventually I could do a few singles, and just kept on increasing the number of sets each session.

in my experience doing loaded pull ups is much more beneficial than unloaded

smiley, where do you think neutral grip pulls fit into training?

for us fatties, it's already loaded.

FFFFUUUUU

Srsly, this



(But really thanks smiley, <3)

I think pronated and supinated grip is probably plenty of variety. If you have access to one of those neutral grip bars, go ahead.

what about inverted rows?

I have my beginner trainees do these with rings. Work on scapula retraction and midline stability.

I know there's probably supposed to be a big crossover between chins and rows, but it doesn't seem to happen for me. I can do hammer chins (there's no straight bar roffflll) with 42.5lbs added for 5 with good form or pullups with 35 added for 6 good reps(I'm 175 right now), but I can pendlay row maybe 140x5 at best while keeping form strict.

Guess I have the opposite problem lol, **** rows!

pretty horribad rows for as good as you are at pull ups

Random thought: I like dumbbell bench rows more than barbell rows. Like the bench is chest support so the movement is all upper back and arm. Barbell row is prob somehow more functional though, or something gay

...across broad modal and time domains?

i kid

I'm pretty sure my reading comprehension is lacking and this question has already been answered in post #4 but I'm going to ask anyway:

If I'm doing the SS practical programming program, which has me chinning two times a week, can I consider this to be enough for a complete noob like me at the beginning of the program? I dont have a chinning bar at home and atm am doing 3 sets of 4-ish reps at bw. FWIW I don't especially want to train to get good at chins, I just want to get as strong as turkish coffee.

yuk yuk yuk tbk.

toothy, my post was aimed at getting that first pullup for people. If you can already do multiples then just following the SS program will work fine. Setting up a chinup bar at home, and doing sets of 2 or 3 several times a day will help your progress with very little effect on recovery (much like doing light recovery workouts on your rest day of pushups, kb swings etc. etc.). However, it won't make a big difference either way.

Great thread.

Want to add "technique." It seems to me that there are some people whose "motor map" of a pullup involves the arms just pulling the entire body up. With them, it's extremely effective to get the scaps retracted (across elite paleolithic modal and time domains, LDO) and learn to recruit the lats properly.

Here's a pretty cool routine for people who can't so more then 1 or 2 pullups. Never tried it but seems like it should work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6KPaCdWHQc

Lets say you do 3-5 sets and go till failure. At which point (amount of reps/set) do you start adding weight instead of just increasing the rep-count?

Why does Rip advocate 3 sets till failure instead of 3x5 with linear increases (adjusted for the fact that the BW most likely also increases during SS) like the other lifts?