Entries by Glenn Cumiskey (3)
Mastering the Pull-Up... Step One...
The pull-up is one of the greatest upper-body strength exercises in existence. It will work your grip, forearms, biceps and triceps, shoulders, lats, spinal muscles, abs, glutes, and even the muscles of the legs; that's pretty much everything. So why, when pull-ups involve minimum outlay for the purchase of equipment (and pull-up bars are included in almost all commercial gyms), don't we see more people doing them. Usually the only thing you'll see hanging from a pull-up bar is a towel. Well the answer is simple - they're HARD! This fact can come as quite a shock to even seasoned athletes who, although proficient in their own sport, may flounder under the strain of raising their own bodyweight a couple of feet through the air. Pull-ups are, for someone new to them, a maximal strength developer. In this series of blogs, to be published every Friday over the coming few months, we'll take you from a complete novice to getting your chin over the bar for the first time. Hopefully if you can follow the advice given, you'll develop slowly, but steadily.
First things first however. I recommend you buy this pull-up bar. It fits most doors, is cheap, solidly built, involves no screw fixings, and is generally delivered within days. So get to it. If you choose not to buy a bar (buy a bar) then you can use your local gym, school playground, or branch of a tree. Now that you have the equipment, I'm going to give you some simple progressions to build up the necessary muscular and neurological structures involved.
The first thing you want to consider is the correct grip. For beginners, I recommend a palm-towards-the-body grip (aka an underhand grip) with the arms far enough apart so that the thumbs are in line with the outside of the shoulders. Technically the movement derived from this grip is a chin-up, and not a pull-up, but for beginners it recruits more of the biceps and is the easiest grip to start with. The grip width will protect your elbow joints while allowing you to express maximum power. As we advance I'll be recommending a variety of other more challenging grips.
Now before you begin writhing like a fish on the deck, just hang from the bar with your arms and body fully extended (you may need to bend your knees to avoid touching the ground). See what's a comfortable time limit for you. You might be surprised. Many people initially find 5 - 10 seconds tough. Whatever your score, record it; this is your baseline, and in the coming weeks when you think you've made no progress, I'm going to get you to look back at it and see what massive gains you've really made.
The next consideration is active and passive shoulders. I want you to hang from the bar again and let your shoulders literally pull out of their sockets. This is termed passive shoulder action and it's not what we want. Instead hang from the bar and strongly suck your shoulders together, both into their sockets while actively drawing the shoulder blades towards the spine. The first thing you'll notice is that you rise up a few inches - great, less distance to travel! The second thing you'll notice is that the muscles of the hands, forearms, upper arms, back, stomach, bum and legs are now working much harder and as a unit. Pull-ups not only make your arms stronger, they facilitate whole body strength, both at the muscular and nervous system level. When you get the hang of both these positions, alternate smoothly between the two... active, passive, active, passive. Now try hanging for time. Begin by using active shoulders. Focus on strongly contracting your whole body. And when you tire, eek out a few more seconds by relaxing your whole body, allowing the shoulders to become passive, and using the least amount of strength to keep you off the floor. Chances are, you will already have beaten your initial hang-time.
For the next week, I want you to hit the bar as often as possible, as fresh and rested as possible, and simply hang. To borrow a phrase from Russian strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline, Grease the Groove i.e. do a little and often. Do it when you get up, at lunch time, before and after tea. Put the bar between you and the fridge and every time you go to open it, hang. If you're a social animal, put it between you and the phone... everytime someone calls, treat yourself with some hang-time after the conversation. Watch a programme you intensely dislike and when you hang from the bar imagine your grip around the throat of the producer. Like a good musician, don't practise, play!
A few final words for this week, and they are strength-to-weight ratio. These words express a very simple but important concept in bodyweight training and it's this; the heavier you are in relation to your strength, the more work you have to do to accomplish the task at hand. Simply put, it's going to be tougher to get your first pull-up if you're overweight, under-strength, and especially if you are both. Don't be disheartened thought, just try and loose a little weight every week if you need to and I'll take care of the strength. What's ahead of you can often take between one to three months, but if you stick with the programme the sheer joy of getting your chin over the bar for the first time will be yours. Then we'll be ready for some real training!
Glenn Cumiskey
Mastering the Pull-Up... Step Two
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
Mastering the Pull-Up... Step Three
Mastering the Pullup... Step 3...
Today we're going to concentrate on negatives. From the perspective of pull-ups this is where, rather than attempting to pull yourself towards the bar, you're going to instead focus on lowering yourself away from the bar. Put very simply, for reasons to do with the way muscle fibres contract, you can lower more weight than you can raise. We're going to use this neat neuromuscular peculiarity to get you well on your way to becoming a pull-up expert.
First find a sturdy platform high enough so that when you stand up on it your collar bones (or equivalent) are approximately level with the horizontal portion of the pull-up bar. If you cannot manage this, simply get your chin over the bar. Now grip the bar and draw yourself forcefully towards it. Raise your knees so that you are now carrying your full body-weight on the pull-up bar. Slowly, to a count of three seconds, lower yourself towards the ground so that you finish with your arms fully extended and the elbow joints straight. If you've never done this before you may be surprised by how much force you have to generate to control your descent. Take a few seconds, a deep breath, and give it another go. Once you're comfortable with this basic motion, set yourself a practise schedule of a few negatives every few hours each day. If you find your arms and lats are sore, take a day's rest between each session. You want to also think of holding a few static positions as you descend, primarily holding yourself at the bar, one-quarter, half and three-quarters the way down. Try to work up to a five second descent with a static hold at one of each position for one second. This will give you a descending pull-up of eight seconds upwards. Keep that up for a few weeks and pretty soon you'll be pulling the door frame off the wall.
In the beginning focus on single attempts. As your confidence and strength grows begin doing double and triple attempts. Give yourself plenty of time to recover between attempts, remembering that the more training you clock up the more your body will need to rest. If at all possible try to begin each descent with your chest rather than your chin pulled up to the bar. This is much harder but pays greater dividends in the long run. Until next week, work hard, train smart and most importantly enjoy it!
A Note on the Kipping Pull-up.
A Kipping Pull-up is the pull-up of choice I would recommend for beginners and seasoned athletes alike. It's more functional, can be completed quicker, will fatigue the smaller muscles involved less (meaning you can go for longer) and is easier to teach beginners. I'm however assuming that most of you are using a basic door-mounted pull-up bar. In a situation like this the kipping pull-up isn't generally suitable as the larger pulling forces it generates could bring your athletic hopes crashing to the ground.