by Tony Torre
*Since we've all been on Covid19 quarantine I've decided to re-post some of my old fitness articles that were originally posted on the old Paladin Press blog. Taking advantage of our free time to improve our physical condition is a wise use of that time. Stay healthy everyone!
In my previous article “Biceps Tears and the Mature Martial Artist” ( January 26, 2017 ), I suggested the pull-up as a great tool for preventing biceps tears, but in reality it does so much more than that. It is an exercise everyone should be doing.
In this article, I will outline some of the more important reasons why the pull-up is so beneficial, along with some training strategies to help you incorporate it into your training. Note: I will focus on the aspects I think readers are most interested in, so this article will necessarily be incomplete since any treatment this brief will fall short. I’d like you to view this as a jumping-off point to start your own research on the pull-up. As for me, I’ve been convinced of the value of the venerable pull-up for decades now.
For starters, the pull-up is a great measure of relative strength. A good goal for the average male weighing around 200 pounds is about 10 repetitions. Those nearer 150 pounds should be working up 20 reps. Females can also work up to very respectable numbers: a reasonable goal to shoot for is 6–8 reps. Of course, many unreasonable people I know exceeded these numbers—often quite dramatically! My senior-most Arnis student, Ozzie (the gentleman I demo techniques on in my DVD Filipino Dirty Boxing), worked up to 40 reps at a body weight of 150 pounds. He also was able to do sets of 15 reps while wearing a 40-pound weighted vest.
Relative strength is your strength in proportion to your body weight. While it is easier to be stronger when you are bigger, it doesn’t always serve the most efficient function. So our goal when talking relative strength is to be as strong as possible within a given body weight. Think of it this way: if a person can squat 500 pounds, he’s pretty strong even if he weighs 300 pounds; but if he weighs 200 pounds, he is relatively stronger. What this means in practical terms is that the lighter person who is able to display greater relative strength will be more agile, explosive, and generally more athletic. Thus, he will be able to do more “things.”
Mastery of the pull-up not only helps general pulling power and arm health, as well as developing that all so sexy V taper that athletic bodies display, but will also make you, in Coach Mark Rippetoe’s words, “harder to kill.” The pull-up is a total upper-body strength developer par excellence, starting with its ability to dramatically develop grip strength. Developing grip strength alone will dramatically increase your overall strength because, simply put, strong hands free up more neural energy that the rest of the body can use in other strength endeavors. Having a strong grip is a good thing for impressive handshakes and in case you need to grab someone by the throat. This upper-body strength will also yield great benefits when clinching and grappling or even when climbing over a wall should your skills fail and you need to escape. But my favorite result is in increased striking power.
No athlete should ignore the pull-up, but martial artists in particular should pay a lot of attention to it. Pull-ups strengthen the latissimus dorsi (often referred to as the lats), which attach diagonally from the shoulder to the hip and greatly aid in rotational movements. Thus by strengthening the lats, our rotational force potential is greatly improved. This will yield huge dividends in dynamic movements that capitalize on the cross body extensor reflex. Yep, more punching power! Try this trick next time you’re working hook punches on the heavy bag to get a sense for how this works. Initiate the punch by forcefully pulling the hip opposite the punching hand, away from direction of the punch. We call this “pulling from the hip.”
While this all sounds awesome, I know at least some of you are thinking, “Great, but I can’t do pull-ups.” Let’s look a solid progression I’ve used with great success. If you can do at least one pull-up, simply do another after you’ve rested sufficiently to be able to do it. Continue until you can do several pull-ups. Once you are doing 10 pull-ups per session, your continuous reps should increase. Don’t worry about taking several minutes between singles. While the volume is fairly low (10 total reps is pretty low), you can keep the frequency fairly high. Every other day is pretty good.
You should vary the grip position every few workouts. Note that because of mechanical advantage some grips will be easier than others. For example, a neutral grip, where the palms face each other, will be easier than a supinated grip, where your palms face in, which, in turn, is easier than the traditional pronated pull grip, where the palm faces outward. You can take advantage of this by starting your practice using a neutral grip and progressing to the more difficult grips as you get stronger. Another slick way to take advantage of this is to adjust to an easier grip once you’ve exhausted the grip you are using and squeeze out a few more reps.
Once you are able to do several reps, you can start using various rep-volume-generating schemes. One I like a lot is to slip in a few pull-ups between other exercises during a training session. While distracted by the main goal of the session, it is pretty easy to add in more volume than you’d expect. I am often surprised at the total number I’ve managed to sneak in this way. Another great tool is a method popularized by strength guru Pavel Tsatsuline, commonly referred to as ladders. You simply start with one rep, then after a brief rest you do two reps, then three, continuing until you can’t go any further, and then start from one rep again. A five-rep ladder will yield 15 total reps. I usually try to shoot for between 30–50 total reps per workout, be that 3 x 10, 6 x 5, or 10 x 3.
If you can’t do any pull-ups at all, try this regression, which I’ve used with great success. One of my students who used it is a young lady who eventually was shaming the boys into working harder on their pull-ups. She eventually went on to play division 1 basketball, but I can’t take any credit for that. Simply start by doing a bent-arm hang in the top position of the pull-up. Once you are able to do it for 30 seconds or longer, try resisting the pull as you lower yourself to the bottom position. This is often referred to as doing a negative. By the time your negative is approximately 30 seconds long, you should be good for one pull-up. Be aware that negatives can be rough and often result in sore muscles, so listen to your body when working on these. Twice a week would be great, but I’ve seen good results with once a week.
You can add supplemental exercises if you are only doing negatives once a week. One possibility is partner- or rubber-band-assisted pull-ups, which will help increase specific endurance while you bridge the strength gap. Some people also use lat pull-downs for that purpose, but in my opinion they are substandard since the motor-unit-recruitment patterns are different and they won’t directly translate to better pull-up execution. Still I’ve been known to do lat pulls when overdoing pulls-ups has irritated my shoulder or elbows.
One last thing I would like to add is that while pull-ups are awesome, they are also very taxing. Programming rest, recovery, and “prehab” is a must. I recommend ramping down the volume (and intensity for those doing weighted pull-ups) every fourth week and taking a week or so off every quarter. This will ensure adequate recovery because nothing is worse than watching your gains “slip through your fingers” as you are forced to rest an injury. Since you’ll be taxing your finger flexors a lot, it would be smart to balance that out by adequately working out the finger extensors. An excellent way to do this is an exercise that I was taught by Mark Denny, “Crafty Dog” of the Dog Brothers. Simply touch all your fingertips to the pad of your thumb, place a rubber band around them, and work on opening your fingers and thumb. To increase the resistance, add more rubber bands, use ranger bands, or, my favorite, try those tacky motivational rubber wristbands. I have several of these in all my gym bags and work them during down time.
OK, folks, there you have it — a quick-and-dirty guide to mastering the pull-up. Let me close with one last tip: I have learned where every pull-up bar is on the route I take to and from work and near my house from every direction. That way I never have an excuse to avoid doing pull-ups. No one said they needed to be attached to a formal workout. Knocking off a few ladders here and there can do wonders for you.