By now you should have spent a week hanging from your pull-up bar, palms shoulder width apart and facing you, and been practising the skill of actively engaging your shoulders in this basic position.  Today we're going to take a few more baby-steps towards the goal of getting your first pull-up.  You're not actually going to be doing any pulling motions yet.  Rather this week's emphasis is going to be on developing maximal tension throughout your whole body, and learning to play with a variety of grips.  Remember that if you're overweight, this is going to be a slower progression than most.

Why maximal tension?  Doesn't it seem wrong to be over-contracting much of your body when you only need to use your arms to get yourself over the bar?  Not so.  As mentioned last week, when you begin pull-ups they act as a maximal strength developer.  Maximal strength is the highest amount of force you can exert under voluntary effort.  This type of effort can be seem in heavy weight-lifting, high-tension isometrics and strenuous bodyweight exercises (e.g. a one-arm chin-up).  For a beginner however a pull-up also requires this type of all-out effort.  One of the keys to developing maximal strength is by developing the ability to keep the whole body 'tight'.  This has two effects: the first is that it amps up your nervous system, meaning that you can generate more force from the target muscles.  Try this experiment; contract the biceps in your upper arm - get a sense of how hard you can contract them.  Now repeat the same exercise but this time strongly squeeze the fist on the same arm, suck the shoulder into the joint, breathe out strongly while pressing down forcibly with your diaphragm into your belly, and squeeze the muscles of your bum together forcibly.  Notice anything?  Your biceps should be billiard ball hard and much tenser than before.  Welcome to the world of high tension.  The second reason for keeping tight is that a rigid load is much easier to lift than a loose, fluid load.  It's the difference between lifting a plank of wood onto your shoulder and trying to do the same thing with a bag of potatoes of the same weight.  You want to be the plank, not the spuds.

OK, so here is how you're going to develop maximal tension as you hang from the bar:
- cross your feet and grip your toes
- squeeze your knees and upper thighs together and suck the legs into the hip sockets
- squeeze your bum muscles together as if pinching a coin between them
- compress your ribs downwards as if trying to shorten the distance between your upper rib cage and your hip
- suck your shoulders both into their sockets and your shoulder blades towards your spine
- strongly grip the bar with your fists
- squeeze your elbows both down and into your sides
- most importantly, at the moment of maximal tension, breathe out while simultaneously pressing your diaphragm down into your belly as if you were bracing for a strike
- if you do generate any upward movement, think of rising away from the bar in an upward arc, rather than going straight up

High tension training like this is very draining so I want you to only practise it occasionally.  If you feel light headed, stop immediately.  Always remember to breathe out when you forcibly contract.  A week of this type of training will set you up for what's to come next.  Once you've mastered the pull-up and can knock out quite a few you can dispel with much of this information.  Then you want to focus on fluidity and the appropriate levels of contraction and relaxation necessary to achieve the goal at hand.  In the mean time I also want you to practise the following variety of grips, both hanging loose and with high tension:

- both palms facing towards you
- both palms facing away from you
- one palm facing you, one facing away
- hang side-on to the bar, palms facing one another