Pull ups

I've written posts about pull ups before, but I'll write another one because I love them!

Pull ups are actually probably one if the best upper body exercises you can do. That's not just me saying that, a ton of the sites I visited about strengthening the back, biceps, and grip said that pull ups are pretty much the best back workout. Lat pulldowns aren't quite the same. They hit the back a little differently, hit less core muscles, and don't require you to move your own body weight. Pull ups do it better.

Let's say you can't do a pull up, should you use a lat pulldown machine? If you want to... but I'd recommend doing assisted pull ups. You can do these at the gym, or use a chair at home.

If you're at home and want to do an assisted pull up, place a chair right behind your pull up bar, put one foot on it, grab the bar (if your bar is up high, use the chair to help you up), then preform a pull up (slowly), using the chair to push you up if needed. Once you reach the top (chin over bar), remove your foot from the chair and do a slow negative. Put your foot on the chair again, and repeat.

A read up on a way to really start your pull up skills. First, make sure you're running 2-5 days a week to burn fat and eating healthy. Burning fat will make your load lighter, thus easier and better for all your joints. A good pull up program to follow is this 8x8. That's a lot of pull ups, so you may want to start out with 8x5. The way this works is you do 8 assisted pull ups, rest 1-3 minutes, do the next 8, rest, then again, and etc... Until you reached either 5 or 8 sets. You could probably slowly add more sets, like add a set every or every other week. Do this 1-3 times a week. Never two days in a row. At the beginning of ever workout, try and do an unassisted pull up. If you can't, that's fine, keep at it. If you can, then do it, and without rest continue your set of 8 reps with the chair to assist you. Eventually you'll be able to do more than one pull up. When you can, do them at the beginning of your workouts! Pretty much the basic rule is do pull ups to fail, subtract that number from 8 eight, and do that many assisted pull ups without rest. Then rest for 1-3 minute and repeat until you complete your 5-8 sets. Once you can do 8 pull ups in a row, you don't need to follow this program. Try something else, mix it up!

I never tried that plan, but it sounds like it'll work. I'd recommend only doing the workout twice week. Otherwise you might overtrain.

Now that you can do eight full pull ups, try slowing them down. Chances are you were cranking those pull ups out with speed. Going slow will make them harder. You can also mix your grip up! Close grip, wide grip, neutral grip, one arm reversed grip, etc!

If you want the pull up to be more than just a back, bicep, forearm, and shoulder workout, try bringing your knees up so that they're parallel to the ground, body at 90 degrees. This with engage your abs as well. Once you can, straighten your legs (requires done flexibility), this is called an L-sit, great static ab workout along with your pull up!

You can do 'around the world' pull ups. You pretty much make a circle with the pull up. It puts more weight on each lat during different parts of the pull up. Make sure to switch directions each pull up.

Another is the T pull up. You do a pull up, bring your nose/chin to your hand, then to the other hand, and back to the middle and then go down.

As usual, you can also add weight to your pull ups. Don't do this unless you can do over 15 slow and controlled pull ups. You need a strong base, or you'll hurt yourself.

There are many ways to add weight. The best is a weight belt and the next is weighted vest. Most people don't own these and don't want to buy them because they're a bit pricey. So what's next? Bend your knees so that your feet are behind you, put a dumbbell between your legs. Wide plate dumbbells work better because they have less of a chance of falling between your legs. This will likely give you a good hamstring burn once you go heavy!

The next thing you can do is a backpack. I don't recommend this. It makes your body very unbalanced. I could see injuries coming along with this. Also, you'll probably destroy the backpack once get over 20 pounds... unless you buy a strong one, but you might as well get the dumbbells, vest or belt instead.

The hardest thing you can do with a pull up is make it one handed. Yeah. That's a toughy. I can't do this. I'll work towards it though!

There are plenty more variations you can try, so keep at them... they can be quite fun and handy! Climbing trees, roofs, rock walls, and mountains will become easier, so will picking up heavy objects, because that's what your back does! Oh, and getting jacked could be a side effect.....