Pull Up Progressions

“Hey everyone! Cory from EarthFIT here. Today I’m going to talk about pull up progression and how to progress to be able to do a pull up without any assistance.

So if we are not on the bar yet with a band, we’ll be doing TRX pull ups and the most important thing we want to do here is we want to pull straight up, so we are not pulling from the the front like where we are with rows. So sometimes people will lead with their hips and pull up, and that’s not what we want to do. We want to keep our hips down below us so we are pulling straight up and we’re using our legs as little as possible so most tension is going to be in the upper body and the arms. And then the TRX is actually going to be as hard as you make it, we can actually make it even harder than normal pull up if we are pulling all the way with our upper body and then keeping our core engaged and this not even using our legs.

Now, once we progress we can be on a pull up bar and we usually start out with a band: we have the green, gray, orange, red and black, and they’re all in different resistances. So if you’re pulling with the band, wrap it around 1-2 feet, we are pulling all the way up and that’s giving us a little bit of help so we can build up to that bodyweight pull up but with the band we want to make sure that you’re not jumping off the boxes much. If you need a little help that’s fine but we want to progress to where you can do it from a dead hang. If we jump off the box too much we are getting all this range of motion with our arms locked out which we really need for the body weight pull up so even with the boxes, it’s just so we can get to the bar, you know you can grab onto the bar and then from here (please see the video) go to a dead hang and then from the dead hang you are going to pull all the way up, so even if I have an extra box here I don’t have to jump off of it. I can just you know let may legs go in front of it or to the side and then pull up like that.

So when we go to the bar and we are doing a bodyweight pull up, we have to do it with our arms locked out so that is why it’s important to build that range of motion, so once we progress to the lighter bands, we can eventually get to the bar and then pull straight up and all the way down, arms locked out. So that’s going to be the progression with that… big thing is we want to pull with our arms locked out, we are not jumping, cheating ourselves that first few inches making the pull up easier; we want to do what we can to make it as hard as possible so we can build it from there.

So I challenge you guys this year, try and get to the point where we are doing bodyweight pull ups.”