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There are many opinions on how to work up to your first pull up. If your out of shape, haven’t worked out in ages, plain over weight or a complete newbie to exercise let me help.

First off for the most part your ability to perform pull-ups is pretty much proportional to your body-fat to muscle ratio. Hence the more you weigh the harder it is to do one. That is taking into consideration that you have average muscle tone.

Lets say that your weight challenged. Lets say by twenty pounds. We are also going to say it has been a while since you set foot in a gym.

One method and probably the best is the old stick with it method. This is every time you are working your back muscles and are going to do pull-ups you have to try as hard as you can to do as many complete reps as possible. Recommended, break your routine up into sets and reps as you would any other exercise.

Start with one complete rep, all the way up, all the way down. If you can only do one rep thats fine if you can do more do as many as you can for your first set. Now you will do five more sets for a total of six sets times as many reps as you can for each set. So if you could do only one rep each set then thats a total of six reps. Rest any where from thirty seconds to a minute between sets.

Now you can do this for a couple of weeks then add either after the first two weeks or from the get go static reps. So what your going to do after each set before you drop down from the bar is to pull up to your sticking point and hold that position for as long as you can, until failure, then rest for the next set.

My third technique is actually away from the pull-up bar. You can do it after you have done your pull-ups or on a off day. Go to the lat pull down cable machine, many gyms have them as part of a cable combo set. Make sure it’s the seated one and sit. adjust the weights to approximately one third to half your body weight, here you will have to gauge for yourself.

Grab the lat bar about shoulder length as you would for a pull-up. Pull the bar down along the front of your torso mimicking a pull-up motion, stop when the bar reaches your lap. Then back up for one full rep. Do five more sets with incremental weight adjustments until you reach the point where you can not bring the bar below your chest. Of course your reps will decrease proportionately to the increase in poundage.

So that’s ten reps the first three sets then eight, six and four. Add one last max rep with the most weight you can handle to the point mentioned before(just below the chest). When you can do say twenty pounds more than your body weight at the time for ten reps, I’ll bet you will have no problem ripping off pull-ups.

All along while your working on this improvement if you lose weight at the same time those reps will get easier and easier.

This should take you a long way in dominating the pull-up bar.

James Bolduc

MrPowerFitness

PowerFitnessSecrets.com