How to Get Your First Pull-Up
Simple strategies and considerations to help you up your pull-up game.
Spark Notes:
Focus on practicing the movement of the pull-up more frequently. If you’re only training it one time per week, increase that to 2-3 times per week.
Adjust your exercise selection to train the pull-up first or second in your workout when you’re less fatigued.
Use a variety of exercises to train the pull-up, especially if you can’t do a full, bodyweight one. This can look like using an assisted machine, using negatives, or even band assisted pull-ups.
Combine all these tips together to help boost your strength and skill and finally get that first pull-up!
Doing a pull-up or chin-up might be one of the most common performance goals I hear from my clients and anyone who I interact with online surrounding fitness.
For good reason too — being able to do one (especially if you never thought you could) is an awesome feat of strength.
So let’s talk about how you can get your first pull-up or how you can increase your strength and ability to do more pull-ups.
I’m going to offer three considerations that you may be overlooking in order to achieve this goal.
1. Movement Frequency
This is probably the biggest area of opportunity that I see with folks struggling with this goal. Simply put, I often see someone training the pull-up only once per week and wondering why their progress is moving at a snails pace.
One thing we often forget is that all movements in the gym are on a spectrum of how much skill is required to do them.
Think of single joint, machine exercises as requiring the least skill (like a leg extension). These can still be awesome exercises, but minimal skill is needed to execute them.
Compare that to a free weight, multi joint exercise like a barbell squat and you can see that much different degrees of skills are needed for the two movements.
The more skill that is needed for a movement, the more you can think of it as needing to be practiced. You don’t need to practice the leg extension machine to blast your quads on it, but you do need to practice the squat in order to get more skilled, coordinated and stronger at the movement.
Pull-ups are one of the more skill based upper body movements. You need to control most of your body in order to make the movement as efficient as possible. This requires skill acquisition, which is achieved through practice.
So if you’re struggling to get better at your pull-ups (or anything really), ask yourself how many times a week you’re practicing that skill. If you’re only doing them once a week, you can still make gains, but it will likely be quite slow.
2. Exercise Order
More often than not, I see folks struggling with pull-ups, but only training them later in their workouts. This is also an area of opportunity.
Exercise order is one of those things that does matter, but is also over valued by a lot of us. We might think that a specific exercise order will be the key to getting as jacked as possible, when in reality, the impacts are probably trivial in this sense.
Where it does matter more, is for when trying to get stronger at a specific movement.
Example: if you want to really get better at your deadlift, don’t do it last in your workout when you’re most fatigued. Do them first in most cases.
Same thing goes for the pull-up. If it’s a primary focus of for you, then prioritize it in your workouts. Have it be first or second on the docket of your workout.
Don’t gas yourself out and then try to practice the pull-up and expect maximal success.
3. Exercise Variety
This is another variable that can be especially helpful with the pull-up. Since the pull-up is a body weight exercise, we’ll want to use different methods to be able to train the movement if you can’t actually do full, bodyweight pull-ups.
If you took my first suggestion and increased the frequency of your pull-ups to three times a week, then we could play with three different types of pull-ups. Here is an example below:
Day 1 — Machine assisted pull-up:
This machine allows you to do full range pull-ups because the added weight actually subtracts from your body weight, making the pull-up lighter. This also allows for you to apply progressive overload in a simple and easy way over time. One downside is that since your knees or feet will be on a platform, less stability will be required.
Day 2 — Band assisted pull-up:
This machine allows you to do full range pull-ups because the added weight actually subtracts from your body weight, making the pull-up lighter. This also allows for you to apply progressive overload in a simple and easy way over time. One downside is that since your knees or feet will be on a platform, less stability will be required.
Day 2 — Negative pull-up:
This technique is where you cheat to get up and then control the eccentric on the way down. We’re generally stronger in the eccentric of a movement so this allows us to fully train the pull-up in the eccentric even if we can’t do a full pull-up. With this, you can progress it by controlling it slower on the way down or even cheating less and less to get up.
Here is an example of what a 3 day a week program might look like using these variations and with the main goal of getting better at pull-ups.
There are countless other ways to design your workout, but this would be a solid one with this goal in mind.
If you’re currently working on getting better at pull-ups, stop to ask yourself about these three variables when it comes to your workouts.
Make sure you’re practicing them enough.
Make sure you’re training them in a less fatigued state.
Make sure to take advantage of different variations if you can’t do a full bodyweight pull-up.
In my experience, taking advantage of these strategies can do quite a bit to get better at pull-ups.
Happy lifting. 💪🏽
Coach Dylan🍻
