Introducing: face pulls

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about rehabbing my left shoulder, which took a beating from a week’s cycle touring holiday followed by a rushed bench session. To be fair to my left shoulder, it was probably more to do with the decade of neglect than the recent events but hey.

Anyway, I’m doing lots of soft tissue work to try and sort it out but I figured it would be useful to do some extra rowing movements to try and speed the rehab process along. Lots of people talk about the benefits of face pulls so I applied myself in my Garage Gym to rigging a system up.

Garage gym set-up for face pulls

You can see from the picture below that I’m using the same basic pulley system that I use for assisted one-arm chins. It has a climbing pulley attached to my pull up bar using a carabiner and a small piece of gear cord. The cable is made also out of climbing gear cord, as it doesn’t stretch. This cable is then attached to weights plates at one end using another carabiner and a sling and to my hands at the other end using another sling.

This is the start of the movement:

And this is the end of the movement. The black sling you can see between the end of the gear cord and the sling attached to the weights plates is just to extend the gear cord such that the weights plates are just about on the ground at the bottom of the rep. This is my weak nod in the direction of risk management…

What I’m doing

I’m doing a couple of light sets of 20 reps with c. 20kg after my soft tissue work in the evenings. Interestingly, the groove is a little elusive. Sometimes I find myself having to concentrate quite hard on keeping my lower back flat. Other times I have to concentrate on stopping my upper back from rounding during the movement. Sometimes I get this great sensation of my shoulder-blades moving together at the end of each rep. It’s changeable.

They also seem to affect what my body does on other exercises. I tried some presses with the bar the other night to see how my shoulder was getting on and suddenly felt much more rear delt engagement than normal.

In short, I’m developing kinesthetic awareness of what my back and arms are doing, which is good, but I’m not there yet, which is bad. I’ll keep you posted on how they work out.

Chris Beardsley's Garage Gym