Pull ups are a fundamental movement inside and outside of the gym. Detailed in nearly every book, magazine, and blog that focuses on fitness, the benefits to you are incredible. Being an integral part of every gym and playground alike, a pull up bar is a tool that is at the center of fitness journeys. The pull up, and all its variations, can also be a center of controversy. Weather that’s figuring out what counts as a repetition or what qualifies as a pull up, the debate is passionate and can ruin relationships. We won’t worry about that here but rather focus on what you need to know to improve your pull up progression.
What Is A Pull Up?
To put it simply, a pull up is when you are hanging from a bar, with your hands facing away from your body. From this hanging position, you contract the muscles of the back and pull yourself up, as far as you can, to the bar you are holding on to. Once at the top you can lower yourself down in a controlled motion.
Pull ups activate your latissimus dorsi muscles (your large back muscles under your armpits also known as “lats”), your trapezius “traps” (The muscle that goes from your neck to your sholders) along with other muscles including the shoulders and biceps. The main muscle being used are the lats, and when doing this motion, it is always key to be focused, mentally, on the focused muscle.
Pull Up vs Chin Up
A chin up is the same except that your grip on the bar is with your palms facing you. The different benefits or types of pull ups is with how you grip the bar. Let’s get into some of the most common variations.
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Assisted Pull Up
Pull Ups For Beginners
If you are just starting out in your journey, this is how beginners do pull ups. The most basic way to execute an assisted pull up is to wrap an elastic band around the bar leaving a loop hanging close to your knees. With the band in between your hands and the loop at your knees, simply put your foot or knee in the loop and do a pull up like described above. The band will assist you up to the bar making you feel “lighter” while allowing you to pull yourself up the same way you would without the band. You can easily apply this method of assistance to any of the variations below. Using this tactic for any pull up (or chin up) variation is a great way to improve your pull up progression
Negative Pull Up
A negative pull up is another great way to progress and increase strength in your back. To do this, you want to think about the pull up as going in reverse. Rather than starting with your arms fully extended, in this case you will start with your chin already above the bar and lower yourself, slowly and controlled, to the ground. Here are step-by-step instructions for performing a negative pull up:
- Stand on the ground below the pull up bar, with your hands by your side.
- Jump up as high as you can and grab the bar with your palms facing away from you.
- While holding on to the momentum of the jump try to pull yourself up as high as you can.
- Once you’ve reached as high as you can go, begin lowering yourself slowly, focusing on your back muscles. Try to lower yourself for 4 seconds before reaching the ground.
- Repeat until you’ve reached your rep goal
Neutral Grip Pull Up
This type of pull up requires a bar that has two small parallel bars that stick out. Think “horns” on the bar.
To use this appropriately, grip the parallel bars with your palms facing each other. This will feel slightly easier as it places more emphasis on your biceps and trapezius than your lats. A Neutral Grip pull up is great for beginners as you get all the major benefits of the exercise but without all the shoulder activation that can be hard to do at first. By doing Neutral Grip, Wide Grip, Close Grip, Chin-ups and Regular Pull ups you will have the basic building blocks to develop some serious strength and get in some intense workouts.
If you find that you are not able to do any variation yet, then you can perform any of the variations assisted. As mentioned earlier, using a band is the most common form of assistance but by no means is that the only form of assistance. Check out your local gym and YouTube for other ways to assist you in developing your pull ups. Once you have mastered the basics there are many ways to “scale up” or make your pull ups more challenging. Let’s dive into some of those.
Wide Grip Pull Up
The wide grip pull up exercise is a tool to focus on your lats. By placing your hands farther outside of your shoulder width than feels natural, you grip the bar with a palms facing out and pull yourself up until your chin clears the bar.
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Close Grip Pull Up
This is the exact opposite of the Wide Grip pull up. Place your arms slightly inside the width of your shoulders gripping the bar with palms facing away. This movement is for you to placing more emphasis on your biceps than on your lats. While it still primarily uses your lats, by doing a Close Grip variation you can work out your biceps harder.
Chest To Bar Pull Up
At this point, we’re beginning to reach beyond the standard exercise and a more advanced pull up progression. This is used with any variation. The difference here is that instead of making the
movement more challenging by adding weight, we keep the weight off and add more range of motion. To do this, pick a pull up variation and instead of pulling your chin above the bar, keep pulling until your chest hits the bar. This may seem like it isn’t that hard because your chin is only a few inches from your chest but give it a go. You’ll see what a difference that few extra inches will make.
Add some extra weight!
You can perform a weighted pull up with any variation. The most common way to do this is by putting on a weight vest then knocking out your sets. Another common way to add weight is to wear a lifting belt and hang a dumbbell or kettlebell from the belt with a chain.
Pause/Paced Variation
When you find that adding weight or adding range of motion isn’t getting the job done,
then you can increase your time under tension. This simply means that you are keeping your muscles contracted for longer in the pull up variation by going slower or pausing during the motion. A pause means that somewhere in the movement (usually at the top) you stop and hold your position on the bar for an amount of time (usually between 1-5 seconds) then continue through the movement and repeat the same movement with the pause for each repetition you do. A paced exercise is when you slow
down your repetition. Typically, this means you take the same amount of time going up as you do going down. For example: 3 seconds up, 3 seconds down. But depending on your goals you can go faster pulling up and slower going down or vice versa.
Take away
Regardless of your goals or where you are in your fitness journey, there is a variation
that you can perform. Thus far we have only touched on the very basics of pull ups. There is plenty more
that we could discuss but for now, we have the basics and some intermediate progressions to start
with. If you have specific fitness goals then you need to make sure that the type of pull up or
chin up you do is aligned with your goals or more importantly, make sure you’re not doing an exercise that could hinder your goals. The only thing we can say for sure is that when done properly, pull ups and all their variations are important tools in the fitness tool box and can be used to keep you healthy, fit, and strong.
