• Introducing pull ups and chins - why they are a good idea and how to do them
• What to do if your shoulder hurts doing pull ups – it may not be the end of the world
• Pull up variants – pronated grip, supinated grip, neutral grip, wide grip, narrow grip and elbow flexor pull ups
• How to do more pull ups – how to do more than one pull up

So why would I want to add weight to my pull ups?

If you want to progress your pull ups, then adding reps will only really work for strength until you have got up to 5 or 6 reps.  After that, you’re training strength endurance.  If you want to get stronger (and ultimately bigger too) then you’ll need to make the exercise harder and adding weight is by far the easiest way to do this.

You can do it by starting gymnastic progressions towards the front lever instead but this is a long and arduous road with little in the way of positive feedback to keep you motivated.

OK, I’m sold.  So how do I add weight pull ups?

You can either add weight to your pull ups in various ways:

• Adding weight plates to a dipping belt
• Adding weight plates to a climbing harness using a sling and carabiner
• Holding a dumbbell on your feet (only for the brave)

I have found that a climbing harness works well as you can distribute the load around the belt and this prevents the weight from changing your centre of gravity too much.  I have found that anything over 2/3 bodyweight in one place starts to tip me forwards or backwards.  Once I get above this weight, I start to add plates to the back of the harness to balance myself out. 

So what programme should I follow?

Whatever programme you follow, make sure you change it up every 2 months (or sooner if you stop progressing).  Having said that, I always try to give a programme at least 4 weeks to show some benefit before I switch.

Eventually, you’ll find the sweet spot of a number of weeks that allows you to progress without stagnating.  I find that for a completely new programme, I can go 2 months and still progress.  For a programme that’s only slightly different from my previous one, I can only really go 4 weeks.

Here’s a good example programme:

This is a good starting programme and is useful for getting plenty of frequent practice in.  Note that it’s not an advanced programme, though: I stopped doing these a long time ago because I wasn’t recovering between workouts.  I think I got to about 50% bodyweight (37.5kg) before this happened…

You do 3 workouts per week and alternate between workout A and workout B.

Workout A

• Weighted pull up – 3 sets of 5 reps
• Upper body push (your choice) – 3 sets of 5 reps
• Some sort of deadlift or clean (your choice) – 3 sets of 5 reps (or whatever you like)
• Ab work

Workout B

• Weighted chin up – 3 sets of 5 reps
• Upper body push (your choice) – 3 sets of 5 reps
• Some sort of squat (your choice) – 3 sets of 5 reps (or whatever you like)
• Ab work

So will I get linear progression?

Some of the time.  You’re aiming for it but you won’t get it every time.  My workout logs show that I was always able to move up by about 1.25kg (2.5lbs) at least every other workout on the weighted pull ups and chins.  Sometimes, particularly when starting a new programme, I was able to move up every time.

So do I need to GOMAD?

No.  Drinking loads of milk or taking in vast amounts of calories in other ways will actually harm your progress.  This is not Starting Strength.  It is not a weight gaining routine.  Just make sure you get plenty of good quality protein, vegetables and some fruit.  Drink lots of water.  Sleep as much as your better half will let you.

While this programme may look superficially like a weight gaining routine, it really isn’t.  On weight gaining routines, you’re looking to add serious muscle and fat and if you do this your weighted pull ups and chins will suffer terribly.  On this programme, you’ll need to eat enough to recover properly but not so much that you get huge.

How do I approach the squats and deadlifts then?

It should go without saying that you’re not trying to bury yourself on the squats and deadlifts.  Be sensible.  Find a few exercises you like and focus on quality over quantity.  One legged variants are your friends here.

If you can do pistols, you will get a lot of benefit from following a similar type of gradual progression with these.  Similarly, one leg deadlifts will follow the same incremental pattern.

What happens when this stops working?

Once this stops working, change the sets and reps up.  I would almost always work my way towards more sets and fewer reps over time.  You can try:

• 4 sets of 4 reps; then
• 5 sets of 3 reps; then
• 6 sets of 2 reps; then
• 8 sets of singles

What kind of progress will I see?

If you:

• started with 3 sets of 5 reps
• added 1.25kg every other time
• went all the way through the above set/rep schemes
• for 8 weeks on each scheme (with a deload week every fourth week)

Then after 10 months you would have put about 30kg (65lbs) on your weighted pull up.  This is a conservative estimate.  I think it’s more likely to be around the 40kg (90lbs) mark, which will put you in a pretty small group of people.

What’s next?

Once I got to half bodyweight, I switched to a standard 4-day per week upper-lower split, with 2 upper body days and 2 lower body days.  I did one lot of chins per week and one lot of pull ups.

I used this template with similar set and rep schemes to get to a double bodyweight chin.  You can drop me an email if you want any more details on this.

• Introducing pull ups and chins - why they are a good idea and how to do them
• What to do if your shoulder hurts doing pull ups – it may not be the end of the world

Are you ready?

OK.  First, let’s chalk up.

If you’re going to do pull ups seriously, then you’re going to need to invest in some chalk.  Otherwise, you’re going to rip your hands to pieces.  If you try and use gloves you might be OK for a while but, as you increase your volume or weight, you’ll find that your grip starts to slip on the bar and you’ll rotate until your hands are where you don’t want them.   And we don’t want that.

The shoulder width chin up

Most people call this a chin up because of the way that the chin tends to come up and over the bar in a curved path.  The important point is that the fingertips are facing back towards the body.  This means that the biceps are used more effectively than if the fingertips were facing away from the body.  The grip tends to be more intuitive for most people, too.  This means that this is the easiest of all the pull up variants and is the one you should generally start with.

The narrow grip chin up

Harder than the shoulder width chin up, this move puts more focus on the biceps and less on the lats.  It is a good exercise to do if you are trying to improve your chin up strength but are finding that your chin up workouts are getting stale.  Swapping between narrow and wide grip chin up workouts for varying sets and reps can provide several years worth of linear improvement (with appropriate deload weeks).

The shoulder width pull up

This is the pull up that everyone thinks of when you say “pull up”. It’s the basic pull up and the one that you’d use if you were climbing out of a ravine or up a tree.  Your fingertips are facing away from you, as they would be if you were climbing upwards.  It’s definitely harder than the shoulder width chin up and probably slightly harder than the narrow grip chin up. 

The narrow grip pull up

This is a slightly more contrived variant, as it is rare that you would need to have your hands so close together when climbing.  However, it does make the standard pull up slightly harder and therefore can be used in a routine to develop arm strength. 

Elbow flexor pull up

Harder than any of the above pull ups, this is the ultimate in biceps exercises.  Despite being a pull up variant and not a chin up, this exercise hits the biceps muscles in a way that is quite unknown to the curls crowd.  Do a few of these with 20kg strapped to your waist and you’ll get a pump like you wouldn’t believe.  The first week I did these I put about half an inch on my arms.

This is the side view.  (Yes, once again we had camera issues and I held this for the best part of an afternoon, which is why I am such an unattractive shade of mauve.  And what is that vein doing in my neck?  I think I need life insurance…)

Summary

So that’s all the pull up variants that I use (excluding front lever work, which is slightly different).  To summarise from easiest to hardest:

• Shoulder width chin – easiest and most intuitive
• Narrow grip chin – slightly harder, more biceps focussed
• Shoulder width pull up – the most functional pull up, a bit harder on the grip
• Narrow grip pull up – harder version of the pull up
• Elbow flexor pull up – hardest version of the pull up, most focus on the biceps

Workouts

The way I use these variants is usually within the following template:

• Workout A: work up to 3RM
• Workout B: sets of reps (6 sets of 2 reps, 5 sets of 3 reps, 3 sets of 5 reps)

The variants can be used to improve as follows:

• progress linearly from 15kg to 20kg with the shoulder width chin, then stall.
• pick up again at 15kg on the narrow grip chin and progress to 20kg, then stall.
• return to 20kg on the shoulder width chin and progress.
• repeat until bored.

Obviously, you could be rotating between shoulder width chins and narrow grip chins on workout A (maxes) and rotating between shoulder grip pull ups and narrow grip pull ups on workout B (reps).  After a while, you could change it up and swap the workouts round so that you were using chins on your rep day and pull ups on your max day.

The trick is keeping things fresh but keeping the weight moving up.

• Starting out – how to work up to one pull up if you can’t already do one
• Staying injury free – what to do if your shoulder hurts
• Pull up variants – pronated grip, supinated grip, neutral grip, wide grip, narrow grip, elbow flexor, isometrics and lock-offs
• Volume progressions – how to do more than one pull up
• Strength progressions – how to build a big weighted pull up

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What does a pull up look like?

This is what a pull up looks like.

The 3 pictures show the bottom, middle and top positions (yes, I did have to hold the middle position for ages while we got the camera to work, which is why I am bright red in the face).  Anyway, the key points are:

• You start from a dead hang
• You start with straight arms
• You don’t flail around or use momentum to throw yourself skywards
• You finish with your chin over the bar

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How do I do a pull up?

You reach up, grab the bar and pull your chin over it.  Anything more sophisticated than that is probably overblown.  If you can’t do a pull up yet, watch out for my tutorial in the next couple of weeks on how to do your first pull up and be prepared for the journey of a lifetime… or something like that.

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Why bother with pull ups and chins?

I must confess, I wrote this paragraph about 4 times before it made sense.  You see, I was somewhat perplexed about where to start.  To be honest, I have got to the point where I do pull ups and chins just to get better at pull ups and chins.  Like a powerlifter, I am only really interested in whether doing a routine will add to my 1RM.

However, I understand that most people don’t think like this!  There are, fortunately for me, lots of benefits:

• Pull ups hit the lats hard and your lats can never be strong enough (as Adam confirms)
• Close-grip chins hit the biceps hard and if you want bigger arms, this is the way forward
• Pull ups are a big, compound movement and therefore cause more testosterone to be released
• Pull ups will help stabilise your shoulders and prevent injury
• Pull ups will help you get a bigger bench
• Pull ups will get you out of trouble if you’re hanging on a cliff edge for dear life… Uh, no I don’t have a link for that one, but you can trust me…

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How do I integrate pull ups into my workouts?

As always, it depends on what you’re already doing and what your goals are.  If you already have a number of specific exercises that you are training for specific goals (like the powerlifts or the Olympic lifts) then you are probably already incorporating pull ups and chins as assistance exercises to help strengthen the lats and biceps.

If you are training for physique goals, then you could consider replacing one of your back or biceps exercises with a chin.  If you’re doing lat pull downs, for example, this would be the obvious exercise to replace as the movement is very similar.

Personally, I have found that pull ups and chins make a great choice for the max effort exercise in an upper body workout as part of a 4-day split routine.  Joe DeFranco has written a great 4-day split workout routine with max effort and repetitive or dynamic effort days called Westside for Skinny Bastards.

I actually tend to do 2 max effort exercises for a 3RM, a pull (always a pull up or a chin) and a push (usually a dip or bench).  This is different from Joe’s programme.  Initially, I was worried that I might overtrain doing this but so far (about 6 months), I have been fine.

***

How do I progress pull ups?

You can either add weight or add reps.  You can add weight in various ways:

• Adding weight plates to a dipping belt
• Adding weight plates to a climbing harness using a sling and carabiner
• Holding a dumbbell on your feet (only for the brave)

I have found that a climbing harness works well as you can distribute the load around the belt and this prevents the weight from changing your centre of gravity too much.  I have found that anything over 2/3 bodyweight in one place starts to tip me forwards or backwards.  Once I get above this weight, I start to add plates to the back of the harness to balance myself out.

Well, that’s my introduction to pull-ups.  Stay tuned for parts 2 to 5…