At the moment

I have some concrete goals to see me through to Easter.  They are:

• a double-bodyweight pull up;
• a 2.5x bodyweight deadlift, probably 187.5kg (415lbs); and
• bench 100kg (220lbs).

Next steps

When I set those goals, I was already thinking about using them as a staging post for bigger and better lifts by the end of 2010.  So my goal list is probably going to start with additional milestones on these lifts, as follows:

• 115% bodyweight chin (somewhere around the world record);
• 3x bodyweight deadlift, probably 225kg (500lbs); and
• 1.5x bodyweight bench, probably 112.5kg

Other goals

There are other lifts that I have been working on in 2009 that I don’t want to let go to waste.

• Pistol: I pushed to get up to a half-bodyweight pistol a while back, lifting 36.25kg (80lbs) at 72.5kg (160lbs) bodyweight.  In 2010, I would like to take this up to 75% bodyweight, probably 56.25kg (124lbs) at 75kg (165lbs) bodyweight.  To support this goal, I have been doing a lot of work capacity lifting recently, around the 25kg – 30kg mark, so I feel confident of pushing up to 40 – 45kg in the near future.  Reaching the 50kg point could be a different ball-game, though.  I dislike doing max-effort lifting with pistols as I find it’s very easy to fall out of the groove and into a deadlift-type movement. 
• One-arm chin: this is actually a very different lift from the weighted two-arm chin or pull up.  I have only recently started training it as my elbows are quite small and easily pick up overuse injuries.  In fact, I may be one of the few people in the world who resisted the temptation to train assisted one-arm chins while training weighted chins at the same time.  Since I got to double-bodyweight before trying a one-arm chin, I have proved to myself that the ability to do a double-bodyweight chin doesn’t equate to one-arm chins.  There is a lot of technique involved.  The movement is also different.  The one-arm chin is more biceps intensive.  Despite that, I’ve quickly got to the point where I can do doubles with 15kg assistance.  I would like to get reps without assistance.
• Dip: I will probably try and match anything I do in the pull up and chin department with an equal lift on my dips.  Having said that, I have no particular love for the lift, it just stops me getting horribly unbalanced.  And I don’t seem to have to work that hard at it compared with other pressing exercises.  I reckon I can improve my dip about twice as fast as my bench, which given how poor my bench is, is quite amazing to me.
• Front Lever: I keep coming back to this skill but something is eluding me.  I am confident that I have the pulling strength and the abdominal strength to get completely horizontal but I can’t seem to get it together.  I would like to spend the necessary time to learn how to hold this position for a decent interval.  The problem is that it interferes with my other lifts terribly.  It drains my upper back for pull ups and chins, destabilises me for bench and weakens my abdominals for lower body lifts.  And recently, I’ve been too tired to fit it in at the end of my workouts.
• Overhead press: I’ve been really ignoring this lift for most of 2009.  When I first started training, my thoracic immobility prevented me from lifting overhead.  I could practically feel my shoulders grinding down to dust.  As I’ve improved my mobility and focussed on abdominal strength, I’ve regained the confidence to lift overhead again.  I have no real concrete numbers to aim for at the moment as I don’t really know what I’m capable of in this lift.  It might be nice to hit bodyweight for reps for the two-hand press but I have no concept yet of whether that is 6 weeks or 6 months worth of work.  I am in most regards an unusual case, owing to my large pull up and dip numbers but small powerlifting numbers.  I actually find one-hand pressing more fulfilling and fun so I may pick a goal on that front instead.  Who knows?

Wild card goals

I haven’t been working on these goals but the thought of them makes me smile, so here they are: 

• Captains of Crush Gripper number 2.5 – this is on my Christmas list, so I will end up playing around with it, whatever else I do in 2010.
• Orang-utan hold: I noticed recently that the world record for the orang-utan hold is 1:45s.  Red rag to a bull.
• Handstand push ups: they look cool.  Enough said.
• One-arm elbow lever: they also look cool and I need something to make me progress the basic elbow lever
• Tuck planche: I keep doing the frog stand when my nephews and nieces and friends’ kids come round and they’re getting bored of it.  I need something else in my repertoire and this could be it.

There really is so much to do and so little time!

What was causing the shoulder pain?

When I last had shoulder pain, it was caused by two things:

• Poor soft tissue quality
• Lack of thoracic spine mobility

Let’s take each of those issues and address them in turn.  I looked at soft tissue quality yesterday so I’m looking at thoracic mobility today.

Thoracic what?

Mobility.  The amount of movement that you have in the thoracic (upper back) area of your spine.  Anatomists divide the spine into four parts, which are, going from top to bottom:

• Cervical (neck)
• Thoracic (upper back)
• Lumbar (lower back)
• Sacral (pelvic)

In short, you need a certain amount of mobility in each part of the spine.  For some parts (such as the sacral) this is very little for other parts (such as the thoracic) it’s quite a lot.

Unfortunately, because we spend a lot of time hunched over our keyboards typing away, most of us have quite poor thoracic mobility.

That tends to mean we overcompensate with forward head posture and excessive lumber spine mobility but both of those are beyond the scope of this article.

Why is thoracic mobility important for avoiding shoulder pain? 

If you are hunched over, this can reduce the amount of room your arm bone has to move in the shoulder joint.  This can cause your shoulder to impinge, which is a bad thing.  It may also be the cause of your shoulder pain!

An impingement of the shoulder is basically where one of the structures (tendons or part of a muscle) gets trapped between the humerus (your arm bone) and the acromion of the scapula (the pointy bit that comes off the shoulder-blade).  If you want more detail than this, try looking into Eric Cressey’s shoulder savers series.

How can I improve my thoracic mobility? 

I’m glad you asked.  The two techniques I use for improving my thoracic mobility are:

• Extensions off a foam roller
• Extensions off two tennis balls taped together

Extensions off a foam roller

Basically, you do a crunch-type movement over a foam roller, moving up and down the various vertebrae of the thoracic part of the spine.  Don’t move into the cervical or lumbar areas as you don’t want extra mobility there! 

The movement looks like this:

Extensions off two tennis balls taped together

Basically, you do a crunch-type movement over a couple of tennis balls taped together, moving up and down the various vertebrae of the thoracic part of the spine.  Don’t move into the cervical or lumbar areas as you don’t want extra mobility there!

The movement looks like this:

Well, that’s what I have found useful in removing shoulder pain when it has troubled me in the past.  I often come back to these techniques when I feel that I might be pushing my luck in the gym or if I start to feel tight.

What was causing the shoulder pain?

When I last had shoulder pain, it was caused by two things:

• Poor soft tissue quality
• Lack of thoracic spine mobility

Let’s take each of those issues and address them in turn.  I’ll look at soft tissue quality today and thoracic mobility tomorrow.

Why should I care about soft tissue quality?  What is tissue quality anyway?

Well, asking about tissue quality is another way of asking how many knots or lumps there are in your muscles.  If you’ve ever been for a massage and the masseur has been kneading away at your back and suddenly they’ve prodded a tender spot that rolls under their fingers – that’s poor tissue quality.  They’ve found a knot. 

If your tissue quality gets really bad, it can be seen by visual inspection, as the affected area is raised, like a pumped muscle.  It sounds impressive but it’s actually quite painful and you have to be wilfully stupid (like me!) to let it get that bad normally…

Anyway, poor tissue quality (knots) just makes your muscles really tight.  And tight muscles cause irritation.  Tony Gentilcore has described it as being like tying a knot in a resistance band.  If your shoulder muscles are tight because they’re full of knots, the amount of room your shoulder joint has got to move is going to be reduced.  And that means that your shoulder is probably going to impinge.

An impingement of the shoulder is basically where one of the structures (tendons or part of a muscle) gets trapped between the humerus (your arm bone) and the acromion of the scapula (the pointy bit that comes off the shoulder-blade).  If you want more detail than this, try looking into Eric Cressey’s shoulder savers series.

The solution is to improve your tissue quality.  You need to remove the knots.

How can I improve my soft tissue quality?

The following picture shows a selection of my pain relief tools!  The foam roller should be familiar to most people as they’ve become quite common in most gyms.  The other items are:

• A hockey ball
• Two baseballs (commemorative versions not essential)
• Two tennis balls taped together

I use the foam roller for general soft tissue management.  You can use it for most large muscle groups, such as the front, back and sides of the thighs and calves but it falls down because of its size when you need to work a smaller muscle.  I use it to cover a large area quickly and find out whether there’s a problem.  If you want to look further into using the roller, then Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson have written well about this subject. 

How do you know if there’s a problem?  Roll the muscle on the roller.  If there’s a problem, it’ll hurt.  Also, if you have a lumpy bit in the muscle that gives a bit when you press it, that’s a knot.  If you’ve been using the roller for a while and you have some stubborn knots, they might not hurt that much when you roll them.  That’s when you need something tougher.  

How do I use the balls to help with soft tissue quality?

I roll on top of them.  I lie on the hockey ball for getting at knots in my back and shoulder girdle.  It’s completely solid and, being smooth, rolls around quite nicely on bare skin without causing welts.  I find the baseballs leave me looking like I’ve been to “one of those sorts of parties”. 

I tend to use the baseballs together (because I have two of them) and they work better when I have a T-shirt on as the stitching grips the fabric and moves with it.

What muscles do I roll?

Well, that depends on where it hurts!  But I find that if my soft tissue quality starts to go, it starts to go all down my back and around my shoulder girdle.  When this happens, I hit the following areas:

• Latissimus dorsi (the two large snowshoe-shapes just above your lower back but also under your armpit: it’s a big muscle)
• Trapezius (the big triangle that has the pointy end towards your lower back and the wide end at your shoulders)
• Rhomboids(hard to find on an anatomy chart as the trapezius and the rotator cuff muscles cover them but the ball will find them about half way up your back, just alongside your spinal erectors)
• Spinal erectors (the snakes running up either side of your spine)
• Rotator cuff(these insinuate themselves under your trapezius and pop out just above your latissimus: they cover over part of the rhomboids)

That’s all a bit technical.  What do you actually do?

Practically speaking, I do this: 

• I lie on my back with the hockey ball under one side of my lower back and gently roll on the ball until it reaches the bottom of my latissimus.
• I work the ball upwards until I find a knot.
• I work at the knot by rolling the ball around on it until it feels a bit softer
• If it’s a really bad knot and doesn’t respond to rolling, I will lean hard on the ball without rolling until I feel the knot start to break up.  When this happens, I feel a release of tension and the ball usually sinks a bit deeper into my back.
• I repeat with the other muscles in my back.
• When I get to the upper trapezius, I often use both the baseballs together to put pressure on both sides at the same time.  For some reason, this seems to work better than doing each side individually.  I don’t know why.

Sometimes, you may need to move your arm around to get at the knots.  Here, I’m putting my arm in the air so I can get at the muscles around my shoulder-blade.

When I’ve finished rolling, I usually finish up with an overhead squat and reach test.  This tells me how successful I’ve been at loosening up the knots.  If I get a bad result, I know I still have a lot of work to do and maybe need to find some new techniques.  If it’s a normal result for me, I know I just need to do the same routine a few more times and I’ll be right as rain. 

Tomorrow, I’ll write about the techniques I’ve used to improve my thoracic mobility, which has also helped a lot in removing shoulder pain.

• 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.

Don’t necessarily rely on your doctor for sports-specific injury help

My friends often ask me why I go to a physical therapist or a sports massage therapist rather than taking advantage of the NHS, which is free (I live in the UK)?  Why not go to a doctor instead?

Well, in the NHS, the local doctors are usually referred to as GP’s or General Practitioners, which means they know a little bit about a huge range of diseases, disorders and other ailments.  This is a good thing if you happen to go down with a bizarre tropical disease after flying back home from Mexico.  But it’s a bad thing if you need help with a bad knee.  What’s the point?  They aren’t specialists.

In the UK, GP’s are basically triage experts.  They see everything from people with Oh-my-God-you-have-5-minutes-to-live diseases to people who have I-have-a-bit-of-a-cold-doctor-but-all-I-really-need-is-some-sympathy-and-a-nice-cup-of-tea disorders.  If you walk into the surgery and ask about a bum shoulder the GP is going to say “rest it and come back in 6 weeks if it’s still a problem”.  You might get a prescription for some pain relievers but frankly you can get those cheaper in the supermarket anyway.

And if you think I’m being unkind about the medical profession, then take a look at the prevailing view on doctors at T-Nation for a no-holds barred approach…

Find a skilled sports massage therapist instead

In contrast, I have found the sports massage therapists I have used to be excellent.  I now recommend the London School of Sports Massage graduates to anyone who will listen.  Every LSSM practitioner I have worked with has understood that I am still going to train whatever they say and has worked with me on that basis.  They know that if they said “don’t do anything for 6 weeks” then I am going to go elsewhere in a hurry.

The London School of Sports Massage also has a feature on its website that allows you to search for practioners close to you.

Tips on how to work with your sports massage therapist

I have found the following approach to pay dividends when working with a sports massage therapist:

• Tell them what hurts and answer their questions honestly
• Ask the therapist what exercises you can do and do them
• Ask the therapist what exercises you can’t do and don’t do them
• Ask the therapist for corrective exercises if appropriate.  If they give you any, make sure that you do them

Speed your recovery

There are a few other things that I have done that have helped speed my recovery from shoulder pain:

• Drink plenty of water before and after massages
• Stretch after massages
• Use hot and cold contrast pads or showers on the affected areas

Balance your pressing and pulling

Once you’re back hitting the gym hard, it’s worth making sure that you aren’t setting yourself up for injury again because of an unbalanced programme.  About a year ago, my pull-up progression stalled.  I reviewed my programme and I found that (unlike most people) I was doing much more pulling than pressing.  To correct things, I introduced dips, which I hadn’t really been doing before.  My dips performance improved incredibly quickly, until it reached a similar level to my pull ups.  After that, they both moved upwards together.  Coincidence?  Probably not. 

A good rule of thumb is that your pull up strength should be similar to your bench press.  So if you weigh 75kg (165lbs) and bench 95kg (210lbs) then you should be adding 20kg (45lbs) to your belt when you do pull ups.  If you’re not then you shouldn’t be surprised if your shoulders hurt, really…

Improve your movement patterns and mobility

Many shoulder problems can be caused by inadequate shoulder movement patterns or mobility.  There have been lots of great articles written on this subject.  I found Eric Cressey’s article series Shoulder Savers to be the most helpful when I had my last injury.  I found the following hints made the most difference for me:

• Thoracic extensions on a foam roller
• More soft tissue work on a foam roller
• More targeted soft tissue work with a tennis ball
• Doing more horizontal rowing
• Sorting out my bench press technique

If your bench press technique isn’t at least as good as mine, you may be at risk of injuring your shoulders…

So that’s how I approach any injuries I get when lifting.  I hate getting injured as much as anyone so I like to have a game plan ready for when I do.  Fortunately, by following my own advice, I’ve been twinge-free for at least 6 months now and hoping it will stay that way!

This is the second article in a 5-part series about pull ups.  The first was a general introduction to pull ups and chins.

• 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

***

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

***

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.

***

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…

***

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…