Can't Do Pull Ups? We Have 7 Tips to Get You There

Pull ups are a basic movement in CrossFit, yet in and of themselves they are an intermediate gymnastic movement. Starting out pulling your bodyweight can seem like an insurmountable task.

Don’t fall prey to the mistakes of progressing too fast, kipping before you’re ready, or skipping over the fundamentals. There are tons of strategies and methods of assistance to get your chin over that bar, but not all of them are helping you to get stronger.

Here we will learn where to begin and which alternatives are worth your time. Here are seven tips for achieving that beautiful, dead-hang pull up:

1. Work Your Mobility

Pullups begin as all movements do - with proper mobility. Work on being able to maintain a proper overhead position exactly as described in my article The Safest and Smartest Progression for Building Your Overhead Lifts. If you start with tight lats, chest, or spine you’re already in a compromised position. This will put more stress on your shoulder joint and spine. For a pull up, you must start in a deadhang position with active shoulders. Once you can hang in this position in a controlled manner, then you can start pulling motions.

If you are unable to achieve a proper active hang position, you can still start building strength while working on your mobility. Work on grip strength using heavy deadlifts along with farmer’s carries. Both will stress the forearm and hands in a similar way to a pull up. To begin building pulling strength, you can do bent over barbell or dumbbell rows. Both are effective at building pulling strength and require less mobility to perform correctly.

2. Get Some Hang Time

Once you open up the mobility to dead hang properly, then you need to start spending time on the bar. Dead hangs for time are an effective way to build shoulder stability and grip strength. Make sure you never let your form suffer during these.

3. Avoid Jumping and Rubber Bands

Jumping pullups and banded pullups are popular in the CrossFit world as a way to get in a workout, but I’ve found little success with these methods and little direct translation into actual pull up strength. Strict banded pullups can be decent for building strength, but during a metcon they get abused and people begin to kip, bounce out of the hole, and squirm in all sorts of ways to finish their reps. If you’re after metabolic conditioning, switch to rows, deadlifts, rowing, ring rows, or some other variation.

4. Build Strength

To get your first pullup what you want to do is build strength. This means operating at 80%+ of your max effort at a minimum. Ring rows are one of the most effective methods to build strength and are easily varied in intensity by changing your positioning. Mark your foot positioning each workout and begin to creep your body closer to parallel with the floor each time. This will increase the load by involving a greater percentage of your bodyweight.

Negative pullups are also effective at building strength. Start with a five-second controlled descent and build to longer durations of time. Eccentric work can be very taxing and leave you sore, so start conservatively and add on as your body tells you. Don’t combine a lot of eccentric pulling work and then a hard metcon involving similar movements.

5. Stay Focused

Remember the body can adapt well in one way at a time. It’s hard to increase strength and endurance at the same time. This is why we cycle our training and have times when we focus on strength and times when we focus on conditioning. If your goal is to do a pull up, then focus on getting that first one now, and then multiple reps later.

6. Resist the Kip

Don’t kip until you can do at least five strict pullups. Kipping is the translation of horizontal momentum to vertical force and allows you to do a greater number of pull ups. Kipping is more efficient, but it also loads the shoulder dynamically, putting more force on it. If you are unable to control your bodyweight, there is no reason to add momentum on top of that.

7. Climb a Rope

Another movement great at building pulling strength is rope climbs. Rope climbing with efficiency involves using your legs to hook the rope and push yourself higher. Your arms hold you in place as you bring your legs up. So for a rope climb you only need to be able to hang on, not just pull your way to the top. Therefore, this is a great tool for people still working on building their pulling strength. If you’re a beginner, though, remember to let your legs help you so you don’t just focus on your arms and get burned out.

Respecting the pullup, training for your current ability level, and listening to your body will yield long-term results. If you’ve never done a pull up, then it’ll take time to get there, but the long smooth road always beats the ups and down of overtraining and progressing too quickly.

10 Strength Training Principles That Will Make All the Difference

1. Start with Bodyweight

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” - Leonardo da Vinci

Let’s start with an admission. My name is Chet Morjaria, and I am a barbell addict.Don’t get me wrong; I love strongman and odd-object training too, amongst other forms of lifting heavy things. But for me, the barbell is where it is at.

However, underneath this mentality is a deep foundation of bodyweight training. No matter how much you can squat, pull off the ground, or get over your head - if you cannot pull yourself up to a bar there is a fundamental and functional strength concern that needs to be addressed.

In addition to the impressive levels of strength that can be built through bodyweight training, it requires an understanding of where your body is in space and where it is in relation to itself - kinaesthetic awareness and proprioception. These are crucial elements of any form of strength training. It can also be argued that the carryover from bodyweight strength training to barbell strength training is greater than the other way round, in the majority of cases.

2. Address Weak Links

Whether you like CrossFit or not, there is one aspect of the way CrossFitters train that you cannot deny - addressing weak links will make you stronger, quicker. Whereas CrossFit does this in a generalist fashion, you can be a little more specific when it comes to your strength goals. Work out which movements or body parts let you down when the going gets tough and the weights get heavy. Then address these elements systematically and specifically.

If you don’t know what your weak links are, go to see a good strength coach and find out. Even better, get them to provide you with a program that will bring these up to scratch. Working on your weaknesses will have the biggest carryover to the rest of your life.

3. Utilize Carryover

We’ve seen this concept of carryover mentioned twice now. Time to drag it out from the back of the stage and give it a mic and a spotlight. You have limited time, energy, and other such expendable resources. To get the most out of your training, you need to work out what works for you, in terms of movements, reps, sets, tempo, and more.

There is only one way to truly work out what does work for you. Get yourself under the bar and experiment. Record your experiments and learn from them. You can also speed up that process by learning from those who have been there before.

4. Train with Strong(er) People

There are plenty of ways you can find strong(er) people. Seek out the strongest person in your gym and ask to train with them. Look up a club specific to the type of lifting you do and get yourself down there to train. Find people who eat, sleep, breathe, and compete in it at a high level. You think these people haven’t learned something along the way?

If you don’t think you can learn from such people, you are wrong. Leave your ego in your gym bag and soak up the inspiration from people who have been there, done that, and got the blood-stained T-shirt.

5. Build a Base with the Basics

So far we’ve looked at strategies to employ in order to get yourself stronger. Now let’s make sure you have the strength basics down.

It doesn’t matter what form of strength training floats your boat or what you are lifting - barbells, odd-objects, or kettlebells to name a few. Ensure that you are pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging, and carrying on a regular basis. These are basic human movements and foundational to building a solid base of strength. Make sure none of these are missing from your training.

6. Find the Missing Piece

Listen to your body. ‘Niggles’ or worse, full-blown injury can be your body’s way of letting you know what’s missing from your training program. A good sports therapist will supply you with a prehab or rehab program. Often the pieces in this program are a good indication of what is missing from your fitness routine. Or you could just let me shorten the process for you: You need to do more rows and rotational work.

7. Be Coachable

Whether you are lucky enough to be coached regularly or not, be open to any coaching you receive. There is a difference between being coached and being coachable. Coaching is a two-way process, and those that give the coach something to work with allow the coach to learn about how you work and how you respond to different styles of coaching. A good coach will use this information to help motivate and improve you in a way that works best for you.

8. Choose Your Flavor

Let’s say you are already doing almost all of the points this article lays out. You have the basics down, are conscious of the gaps, and have the right people around you. Yet you do not seem to be getting much closer to your goal.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s likely you are going about your strength training the wrong way. If you are working towards specific strength goals, you need to build the appropriate kind of strength. The foundation is that of absolute strength, but there comes a point where you need to make sure your style of training is a good fit.

Take the Olympic lifts as an example. These are fast lifts. Training in slow and steady movements will not prepare you as well as explosive and powerful ones in terms of developing the flavor of strength required - in this case, speed-strength.

9. Less is Better

We have discussed a number of strength training principles here, and a number of them involve assessing the way that you train. However, do not confuse this with continually adding stuff to your training schedule. We are talking about efficiency of training. Make sure that as you develop your training, you also streamline your approach to optimise virtuosity, recovery and, of course, intensity. Keeping your program sharp in this way will also allow you to simply assess exactly which of the modifications you are make are working and which are not.

10. Test the Mind

Who sets your limits? The body will give up long before the mind does. Find ways to challenge your everyday training principles and push past perceived boundaries. Here are three ways to do so:

• Competition: Put yourself into a competitive situation in your chosen field of play. Anyone who has done so will attest that lifting in a competitive situation is worlds apart from lifting on your own in your favorite corner of the gym. Some people seize up. Others revel at the chance. Whatever happens, you will learn more about yourself and the way your work (or don’t work).
• Coach: A good coach should know you better than you know yourself. Putting yourself in the hands of such a person can help you take yourself to places that you didn’t think possible, knowing that you are still within the realms of safety whilst doing so.
• Change: Mix it up from time to time. I advocate having one play session a week, where you can do whatever you want. Always do combinations of 5s and 3s for squats? Try 20 reps. Always lift with a barbell? Pick up an awkward object and lift that instead. Trying something new removes any notion of a reference point in terms of personal bests, or limits.

(By the way, the answer to the question at the start of this section is there are no limits.)

In summary - be considered about what you train, how you train, and who you train with. Yet sometimes, throw this consideration to the wind and dive head first into unfamiliar territory. Ingest, understand and adopt the strength training principles outlined above to drive your strength to the next level, and beyond.