Pull-ups – Functional Strength Training – Untapped Strength
A pull-ups is a compound exercise which works a large number of muscles in your back, shoulders, and arms at the same time.
If you want to do pull-ups, you need to hold on to a sturdy bar with a firm overhand grip and your hands separated by a distance that is about the same as your shoulder width. With your arms straight, let your body fall from the bar. In the next step, pull yourself up to the final position where your chest is close to the bar and your chin is over the bar.
When you’re pulling, try to keep your body straight and not arch or swing. As soon as your chin is over the bar, you can lower yourself back to the start. Check out that while you do pull-ups, you can keep your legs straight or bend your knees and cross them so that your feet don’t touch the ground.
In the beginning, it’s also a good idea not to relax too much. When you relax too much, it can put a lot of stress on your shoulder joints.
As you may have guessed, there are many diverse approaches to do pull-ups. The following are some of the most common pull-up variations that you might see in your gym. You can do them in a number of ways.
Variations Of Pull-ups: Wide-Grip Pull-ups
Wide-grip pull-ups are used to focus on your lats, not your biceps, instead of your biceps. For wide grip pull ups, the same rules apply as for regular pull-ups that were talked about above. Keep your hands about twice the width of your shoulders apart when you hold on to a sturdy bar.
Separating your hands in this way makes sure that you work your lats more.
Hang from the bar with your arms straight. Then, pull yourself up so that your chest almost touches the bar and your chin is above the bar. When you do wide-grip pull-ups, it’s good to think about using your lats to pull your elbows down toward your ribcage.
Also, try to keep your body straight and not arch or swing during the pull. As soon as your lats are fully contracted and your chin is over the bar, you can lower yourself back to the start. If you want to do pull-ups, you can bend your knees and cross your feet or keep your legs straight.
Variations Of Pull-ups: Close-Grip Pull-ups
Close-grip pull-ups are yet another fantastic way to do pull-ups that work your lower lats.
If you want to do close-grip pull-ups, you can grip a sturdy bar with a firm overhand grip and keep your hands about 6-8 inches apart. When you do this exercise, your hands should be very close together so that you focus on your lower lats.
Close-grip pull-ups start with you hanging from the bar with your arms straight. When you do a close-grip pull-up, pull yourself up so that your chin is over the bar and your hands are almost touching your chest. Then, lower yourself back down to the starting position and repeat.
Make sure not to swing your body or lean too far back when you’re on your way up.
Variations Of Pull-ups: Underhand-Grip Pull-ups/Chins
As you do chins, you grip your hands underhand and reverse-grip them so that the palms of your hands are facing you at all times.
Make sure you have about 6-8 inches of space between your hands to do a chin-up. Allow yourself to stay in the first position with your arms straight. In the beginning, it’s a good idea not to relax your muscles too much, because you don’t want to hurt yourself. When you relax too much, it can put a lot of stress on your shoulder joints.
Pull yourself up and try to touch either your chin or upper chest to the bar. There is a way to slowly get back to the original position after you get to the last place. As with other types of pull-ups, you can keep your legs straight or bent and crossed during the exercise. You should not swing back and forth.
Variations Of Pull-ups: Gorilla Chin/Crunch
You can also do gorilla chin/crunch pull-ups; they work both your biceps and your abdomen.
In the beginning, your knees are bent at a 90-degree angle and your hands are about 12 inches apart. This is the gorilla chin/crunch. It’s like doing both a chin-up and crunch at the same time.
You pull yourself up with your arms, chin-up style, and bring your knees up to your chest at the same time. When you get to the end, you will have done both the chin and the crunch at the same time.
Finally, your nose will be near the bar and your knees will be pulled up to your chest.
When you’re done, you can both lower yourself and let your knees move away from your chest to get back to the start.
When Bodyweight Is Not Enough
As you may have realised, the resistance you use when you do pull-ups comes from your own body weight. It’s likely that as you get stronger, you’ll need more resistance than just your own body weight.
A way to solve this problem is to hang weight plates from your waist with a dipping belt.
To use the dipping belt, put it around your waist and pass the clasp and chain through a ring on one end of it. Then, you can use it. Pulling the chain makes the belt tighter around your waist.
Next, pass the clasp and chain through one or more weight plates. Then, attach the clasp to the ring on the other end of the chain.
Because the plates are so heavy, the belt stays tight around your waist. This means that you can now carefully walk over to the chin bar and do some weighted chins or pull-ups, but be very careful.
When Bodyweight Is Too Much
Some trainees may not yet be strong enough to hold their own weight on the chinning bar, or they may not be able to do enough repetitions. In this case, Pulldowns are a great way to get the benefits of pull-ups until the trainee is strong enough to do regular pull ups.
When you do pull-downs, you use a machine called a lat pull-down machine, or you can use a high pulley with a pull-down bar attached to it. You can do pull-downs by putting your knees under the kneepads of the pull-down machine, gripping the bar with a shoulder-width grip, and letting your arms straighten.
Then, pull the bar down to the final position where the bar is close to your chest.
When you’re pulling, try to keep your body straight and not arch your back, swing back and forth, or lean too far backward. As soon as the bar is almost touching your chest, you can let the bar slowly rise up until you’re back in the starting place.
As with pull-ups, there are different variations of pull-downs that you can do to put more emphasis on certain muscles. The variations of pull-downs are similar to the variations of Pull-ups above, with the main difference being that you start by putting your legs under the kneepads of a pull-down machine and then use a pull-down bar.
If you really want to work your lats, you might want to do full range-of-motion pull downs.
In this variation of pull-downs, you can either sit on a high bench, stand, or grip two stirrup cables that are attached to two high pulleys. It’s important to hold on to the stirrup cables with both hands so that your arms are crossed in front of you and your palms face forward.
As you keep your chest up and your back arched, use your lats to pull your elbows toward your ribcage.
During this move, rotate your hands so that the palms of your hands face each other when you get to the end. Keep in mind that when you do full range-of-motion pull-downs, your range of motion will be in an arc instead of straight up and down.
Add Pull-ups and Pulldowns to your training.
When you understand how to do pull-ups and pull-downs, we’ll show you how to use them in your training.
When you do pull-ups, you usually work the muscles in your back and arms, so it’s a good idea to do push-ups at the same time. To do pull-ups and dips together is one way to work your chest and triceps and front shoulder muscles.
Another way to do Pull-ups is to do different types of bench presses, which also work the chest, triceps, and front shoulder muscles, as well as the back of the shoulder.
You can do wide-grip pull downs between incline bench press and dips in a full-body workout like this one.
The one-arm rows also work the back, shoulder, and biceps. Wide-grip pull-downs are then done, and then the dips, which work your chest and triceps, come next. In this way, the back, biceps, and rear shoulder muscles get a break before they are worked again with one-arm rows.
Now, let’s look at a few short workouts that include different types of pull-ups. In the next exercise, you do wide-grip pull-ups to focus on your lats.
This is a very short routine that gives you more time to train more. A bench press with a tight grip is used to work the triceps, so keep that in mind. Following is a similar routine that also gives you more time to work out more. There are also exercises that use a lot of weight and are called “heavy compound moves.” Notice that chins are used in this routine because they work both the biceps and the lats, which are both important parts of the body.
Another common method is to choose different exercises that are done every other workout day.
To get a full-body workout, you could choose one of the following options, like this.
A is done on one workout day, B is done on the next workout day, and so on. We do chins and rows in between the dips and the dips.
Another idea is to divide your workout into push exercises and pull exercises, which is also a good one.
Different workout days are set aside for muscles that push and muscles that pull, like the front chest muscles, the triceps muscles, and the rear shoulder muscles. Following is a group of upper-body exercises that switch between push and pull exercises every so often.
In Workout A, you do the bench press and dips, which are both compound pushing exercises. In Workout B, you do the chins and rows, which are both compound pulling exercises, too. Triceps extensions and bicep curls are two exercises that are done only for the arm. They are thrown in for a little extra arm work.
As you can see, all of the above routines are pretty much full-body routines. Many lifters, on the other hand, prefer to break up their workouts so that different body parts can be worked on on different days.
As a result, splitting your training up allows you to work more intensely on specific muscle groups and give them a chance to recover more thoroughly than would be possible if you didn’t do it this way.