How To Do A Pull Up

I'm often asked how to do a pull up. There seems to be a lot of confusion with regards to perfect pull up technique.

If you do it right, you'll reap the benefits of a strong and muscular back. You'll also be shoring yourself up and preventing the injuries so common to imbalanced shoulder musculature. We place so much emphasis on the "mirror" muscles, that the back is often ignored.

But doing it wrong can drastically reduce the effectiveness of the exercise and can even lead to injury. Here's a video with a few points to consider...






The pull up is one of the most fundamental bodyweight exercise. And of course the other "king of bodyweight exercises" has to be the push up. Make sure you master both and incorporate them into your training...

The Best Pull Up Bar

It's pretty easy to make a case for pull ups and chin ups playing a pivotal role in ALL exercise programs. I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the "primal" movement patterns that our ancestors had to excel at in order to survive.

If our predecessors couldn't do basic things like climb trees or pull themselves up into a cave on a cliff face, they faced the likelihood of not sticking around long enough to pass on their genes. But in our modern training programs, pulling movements seem to be the first thing to get dropped...

Personally, I like to do a lot of my training at home, so I opted to have the "Roles Royce" of pull up bars made for me. You can click this link to see my custom pull up bar.

But other options are out there. You can find tons of do-it-yourself plans using simple plumbing supplies from your local hardware store.

And there are ready-made solutions that can also work well. A popular and convenient choice is the doorway mounted devices that can be pulled out and installed before your workout and stored away when you're done. The problem with those is that you don't have the stability to do more advanced movements like kipping pull ups.

Anchored options, mounted to the wall or ceiling, are another option in commercially available set ups. When possible, I'd go with a ceiling mount over a wall mount just because of clearance issues when you want to start do kipping pull ups.

And of course, if you belong to a gym, the best option is the pull up bar incorporated into most power rack stations. Usually, a gym will also have enough ceiling height to allow you to go over the bar for when you want to start working on muscle ups.

No matter what option you choose, make sure you start incorporating pull ups today...!