Training to get your first pullup is a fantastic goal. It requires all-round strength and a mastery of your bodyweight. It also has real world applications, should you ever find yourself in a Cliffhanger-style situation.
However, getting that first pullup can be a frustrating journey too. Many people struggle to overcome the major hurdles that come with gaining the strength – and skill – to perform a brand new movement.
Through my time of helping people get their first pullup, I see the same mistakes being made time and again. Luckily, they have simple fixes.
Want more help with your pullups? I have specific online programmes for pullups and deadlifts. These are made with all experience levels in mind! Fill in the contact form at the bottom of the blog if you’d like to know more.
1. Treat Pullups Like Any Other Strength Exercise
In strength training we often refer to a 1-rep max, which is the most weight you can lift for one rep of a given exercise. This represents 100% of your recorded strength. Therefore anything heavier than this, which you cannot lift, is over 100% and is referred to as supra-maximal training. The main way we engage with supra-maximal loads is by performing negative reps (eccentrics). Negative reps can be incredibly fatiguing and damaging to a muscle, given that they involve a muscle being forced to lengthen under load.
If you’ve set yourself the goal of doing a pullup, chances are you’ve been told to do pullup negatives. Along with band-assisted pullups, they are one of the most common pullup variations. However, they fit the description of a supra-maximal eccentric: your muscles are being forced to lengthen against a level of resistance that you couldn’t lift even if you wanted to.
Basically, when you perform negative pullups you are performing a very high level of strength training. This means it will tire you out and probably make you sore, especially the first couple of times you do it.
Most people have a blindspot for bodyweight training, believing that it is inherently easier or safer than resistance training. However, bodyweight exercises vary just like weights do, with some being easy and some being incredibly hard. You need to respect the strain you’re putting your body through when you do negative pullups.
This means:
- Doing you pullup training while you’re fresh;
- Having plenty of rest between sets;
- Ensuring good recovery after a pullup session.
More of a visual learner? I have a video on pullup training mistakes too! It goes into greater detail on this first point, and provides some handy tips for solving this problem.
2. Don’t Beat Yourself Up On a Bad Pullup Day
I think we’ve established that pullups are hard. Even if you can do 2-5 full pullups, that still represents a very high intensity of strength training – a 2 to 5-rep max.
At these intensities, gaining the strength to do just one extra rep is a significant challenge. If you can do 4 pullups, then in order to do 5 you have to produce another 25% of extra work, on top of the accumulated fatigue of the 4 you’ve already done. In a nutshell: pullup progress will be slow.
Strength levels naturally fluctuate, too. Training so close to maximum effort also means you’re really going to notice those days when your strength level drops, either through fatigue or just because your body said so. On top of that, we all know that your bodyweight fluctuates too.
This all means that on an unlucky week, you could be weaker AND heavier!
Unfortunately, this is just something you have to prepare yourself for. The good news is that once you accept this, you’re less likely to give up or blame yourself after a bad day at the pullup bar. Do what you can, even if that means adding bands or going back to negatives for a week, or doing less reps or resting more.
It’s also a good reason to train well within your limits. If you can do 5 pullups on a good day, spend most of your time doing 3 reps or less. If you can do one pullup, only do one and then move on to assisted or negative reps. This is how you will train good-quality reps, whilst also doing enough reps to practice and create overload, whilst also maintaining a positive outlook on your training.
My client Lydia was frustrated with her pullup progress for a few months before I suggested she try my new pullup programme. By the end of it, she went from being able to do 4 tough close-grip pullups to performing multiple sets of 4 wide-grip pullups, which are much harder!
3. Make Pullups the Main Focus of Your Training Programme
Getting stronger can be done in very simple, very minimalist ways. An extra rep here, and extra kilo there, and you can chip away at strength gains without necessarily feeling the difference each week.
However, training yourself to do a move you can’t currently do is much harder, and if you only train that movement for 3-4 sets a week, you’re going to be waiting a long time to get that first pullup. You will need to dedicate a significant portion of your training time to getting stronger in this movement.
This doesn’t mean you should do negative pullups every day for 6 weeks – this goes against what I’ve already discussed. However, you can tackle your pullup training in a variety of ways ensuring that you avoid overuse and boredom. With some savvy programming, you can do this whilst maintaining some other training aims, too.
I’ve used these tactics to help plenty of clients improve their pullups and pushups. If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you improve yours, get in touch!