Can you do a pull up? Not many people can. Wouldn’t it be super impressive to be able to hit the play ground this summer and knock off a few?
It takes practice and a bit of finesse to figure out how to recruit the right muscles to do your first pull up. After you’ve figured out what muscles to recruit, it’s only a matter of time and hard work to go from one pull up to ten.
The key to learning how to do a pull up is to work the ‘eccentric’ contraction. That is, help yourself on the way up and take your weight on the way down. The eccentric, or lengthening portion of any movement is the strengthening phase, this is opposite to what most think. The lengthening phase is also the portion of the movement that causes the most muscle soreness. You need to be careful when doing these. It’s a great way to start to build up the strength to be able to do a pull up on your own or increase the number of pull ups you can do.
In this video, I’ll walk you through how to work up to doing a pull up on your own: