How to get your first pull up

Pull ups are an awesome exercise, they work the arms, back, shoulders and core, as well as blasting your grip. But sometimes people can find it difficult to get that first pull up,  they are a difficult exercise. If you go through the following steps, you'll be doing pull ups before you know it, and you'll be able to see the difference in the mirror also.

For each of these progressions, I will be giving a progression level, once you get to this progression level, you are strong enough to move onto the next exercise. If you are having trouble increasing your repetitions have a look at this blog post for a simple way to increase your reps on an exercise.

Step 1 - High recline row.

Find something you can throw around a surface, rings are preferable, but you can use anything that can hold your weight will work, I am using a karate belt here. Stand with your feet directly underneath the anchor point with your feet shoulder width apart. Lean back, (bottom left) and pull your arms in until you are standing upright (bottom right). Lower down to the starting position and repeat.

Progression level: 3 sets of 25

 

Step 2 - Recline row.
Over time, slowly move your feet further forward (6 inches at a time works well, work up to 3 sets of 25 each time). Continue moving your feet forward until your shoulders are directly under the anchor point, row up until your hands are as close to your chest as your flexibility allows you to, lower down and repeat. At first, reach the progression level with your legs bent at 90 degrees, then straighten your legs out and work up to the progression level again.

Progression level: 3 sets of 25

Step 3 - Chin up hold

Jump up so that your chin is over the bar, and hold it.

Progression level:  3 sets of 20 seconds

Step 4 - Half pull up
Jump up so that your chin is over the bar, lower yourself down until your arms are at 90 degrees, come back up until your chin is still over the bar, repeat. If you cannot go down to half way, only go quarter way down, reach the progression level, then go to half pull ups.

Progression level: 3 sets of 10

Step 5 - full pull up
Hang from the bar, so that your arms are slightly bent, pull up until your chin is over the bar, lower down to the beginning position, repeat.

Target level: 1 set of 20

Hope this article helps
Enjoy the gains
Alex

Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 2

This is part 2 of a selection of things I am using to change up my pull up training, if you haven't seen part 1, click here to check it out
Baseballs

Just put a bolt through a baseball and hook it to a chin up bar, you can also use hockey ball or anything strong enough to hold your weight. This requires a whole new level of grip strength. When training these with lock offs, it would give me a dead arm after every rep, this will kill your biceps as well.
Fat gripz

These are grips, that are fat. They will make the chin ups more difficult. Stick them on the bar and use them for the next 4 weeks, take them off and your chin ups will be stronger
Gymnastics rings

These are difficult as hell, but I am not really sure why, one arm chins on this are crazy difficult for me, but I'm working on it.
Rock rings

These are a cool tool by Metolius, normally used by rock climbers. They have 3 levels, each one gets more narrow and the ledge gets smaller, making it more challenging, you can also grab the top and just use it as a chin up handle. I am currently using them to try and get a door frame one arm chin. So I can do them Anywhere.

Thanks, hope this helps,
Enjoy the gains
Alex

progress from the advanced tuck planche to the half lay straddle planche

Progressing from the advanced tuck planche to the straddle seems like an impossible task for anyone, especially if you are built a little heavier than the rest. I was stuck in the adv. tuck planche for what felt like a lifetime, and there were no articles on how to progress between these two progressions that differ so much in difficulty and load on the muscles and joints.

This article will show you the progression that I used to get to the half lay straddle, once I got that for ~5 seconds, I got a full planche (a low/banana planche), so I actually skipped the straddle when using this progression.

Once you can do each of these holds for 5-10 seconds, start doing push ups, when you can do 5 push ups, go onto the next progression. Don't do these progressions until you can do an adv. tuck planche with your knees behind your elbows for at least 5 seconds

1: start doing your tuck planche like this:

If you can't see the image very well, basically, do the tuck planche with your legs straddled, but your thighs still vertical, Make sure not to rest your knees on your arms.

2: Frog planche:

As you can see in the image, lean forward a little more, and push your thighs back, so the are at a 45 degree angle. Almost there.

2:half lay/crooked planche:

Lean forward even more, and push your legs back until they are in line with your torso. It will feel like you almost lock into place. You will find that you will be a lot lower and your back will be a bit arched, this is fine, I actually think it looks cool this way. But as you get stronger try spreading your lats and get into that hollow back position.

Hope this helps.
Enjoy the gains,
Alex (Don't forget to stretch your glutes) Heath

Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 1

In this post, I will be going over the different grips I am using and the grips I am trying to use in order to keep my one arm chin training. Even though I will be speaking about them in regards to one arm chins, you can also use these variations with 2 arms, rows, front levers or even deadlifts if you are a freak.

1: Towels

I know a few of this may find this weird or stupid, but this, in my opinion, is the best place to start. I remember buying 6 tea towels when i was 16, and just doing one arm hangs, and one arm lock-offs on them, and my forearms grew and my grip got stronger, they are also great because the twist, so you can supinate your hands at the top of the pull up and get a great contraction on the short head of the bicep, this free rotation can also help avoid elbow and shoulder pain.

2:Rotating handles

I'm too poor to buy a 'rolling thunder', so I just brought a pair of those cable attachments that rotate, and strapped them to the pull up bar. When you try and hang of them with just one arm it will try and tear your hand off your arm, and may succeed. But when I got a one arm chin on it for the first time, I knew I had reached a milestone in my strength. You could add a fatgrip on it and make it as thick as a 'rolling thunder', I am yet to get a one arm chin off that. But when I am able to do that, I will go out and tear someones arm off just because I can.

3: Eagle loops

These were a little bit cheaper than the 'rolling thunder' so I got them. Normally. Whats cool, is that you can slowly reduce the number of fingers you use until you you get down to one finger, my current best is a one arm chin on 2 fingers.

4: Homemade chin up handle

I just made this from chain and a pole my mate found in the woods, all we had to do was wash the blood off it and lay low for a while (that was a joke). This is good because it allows you to be able to do one arm chins anywhere, just strap it to something overhead. You can also put fatgripz on them. They also allow you to do neutral grip one arm chins on a regular chin up bar. I found the neutral grip the easiest to learn when first doing the one arm chin.

This post is already pretty long, so I will be back with more ways to switch up your chin ups.

Enjoy your gains
Alex

Me and 'ladies man' my local paper boy

You want a 500 lb bench what??

Here I am going to be laying out my long term upper body strength goals (aim to get this aged 25, so 7 years), for my lower body I have not chosen to have any serious long term goals, I wouldn’t mind being able to dunk within a year, but apart from that I am just going to have fun and see how much I can squat. All of these targets will seem pretty far fetched, but you can’t hit anything without aiming at something. So here they are:
500 lb bench press: I don’t know how much I have to weigh to get this as a natural athlete, or if it has even been done before, for now, my main pushing strength I will be working planche and handstand push ups. But I will incorporate partial bench presses working up to 500lbs and slowly increasing the ROM over the 7 years. But I will be very careful of elbow pain and will progress at a very slow pace, it will not be my primary focus for now.
100 one arm pull ups (50 each side) ok, this one is straight out crazy, Jasper Benincasa could do 25 on each side, alternating arms each rep, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go for twice that,  I am planning on doing this through steady state cycles, slowly increasing the number of reps as the cycles progress. Once I get 10 each side, I may have to get more creative, maybe do some west-side style training, I don’t know, I will think about it closer to the time.

100 Full planche push ups: This is going to be a challenge, I am currently doing crooked planche push ups (below), or about 10 reps, so I will aim to get 100 of those and work from there, to try and get my work capacity up before i do it in harder movements such as the full planche.

120kg strict curl: I am a torso dominant athlete, and so my arms have always lagged behind, After seeing Denis Cyplenkov do it, I thought I had to at least give it a go, I will go over how I plan on doing this in the near future

Enjoy the gains
Alex

A cheap way to get a better grip on the bar

Ever noticed that when you into your pull up work out, the grip starts to get tired, your hands start to sweat, and suddenly its not pull ups that your failing on, but just holding onto the bar?
don’t get me wrong I believe that developing grip strength is very important when doing exercises like pull ups, i could list the benefits for days (I may do at some point soon :L) but if you want to test your gripping strength, something like a thick bar is better than wetting up your hands before every set.
I am currently training one arm pull ups (cheeky picture of me below), so every issue that you get with regular pull ups is doubled when you switched to one arms. And I do not want to be having to deal with slipping off the bar half way through my set. You can always use chalk But an impromptu chinning session when you are out and have some spare time will leave you chalk-less and slippery, unless you want to carry your chalk around with you.

I was training a client one day, we were doing super sets with chin ups and farmers walks with fat gripz. Into the 3rd or 4th set, his hands started to slip on the pull ups, so we wrapped one of those Pilates bands around the bar and it worked perfectly.

These bands can be brought off Ebay for under £5, simply cut a couple of 3-5 inch sections off and wrap them around the bar when doing pull ups and enjoy the friction.
Enjoy the gains,
Alex

Getting 100 reps of a difficult exercise (periodisation method)

Everyone that has been doing calisthenics for a while has at least heard of a program that gets you 100 push ups or 200 sit ups. And these programs are fantastic. But what if you want to get super high reps of an 'advanced' exercise (e.g dips or handstand push ups)?
when it comes to doing difficult exercises for high reps, you will plateau quickly, so multiple methods will have to be used, this one is called the periodisation method.  I will be using push ups as an example, when your target reps is 100.

1. Start a routine where you are doing 100% - 200% of your target reps a day. Example: make sure you are doing 100-200 push ups a day
2. find your max, during the day, just go for max efforts when you feel like it, only go for a max effort 2 or 3 times a week. Example: you currently have 32 push ups.
3. add some kind of small resistance, for example: resistance bands, pause reps, a different variation. and work up to your current max without the resistance.Example: change to diamond/ close grip push ups and work back up to 32 push ups (While keeping your total volume daily at 100-200 push ups)
4. Test your max, it should have increased 
5. Take a week of just doing your regular variation, getting 100% - 200% of your target reps daily. Example: go back to doing 100-200 push ups daily, making an effort to increase the reps in your sets. 
6. Repeat steps 1-4

 Now obviously the harder the resistance, the longer it will take you to get back to your max, but the rep increases will be much better, so have a think about how much resistance you will use. Also change it every cycle, keeping up variation is another way of keeping from hitting plateaus.

Enjoy your strength gains.
Alex