A Comprehensive Guide to Achieving Mastery of the Pull-Up
The pull-up is an incredibly rewarding exercise. Not only does it strengthen your back, shoulder, and arm muscles, but it also provides a great challenge and a sense of accomplishment. When you can successfully do a pull-up, you can feel a sense of pride and strength that you can take into other areas of your life.
The back muscles–lats, traps, and rhomboids do most of the work, but you can target these areas differently by changing your grip.
This exercise strengthens your core muscles and is one of the most effective and simple ways to hit your back and upper body when working out at home, as all you need is a doorframe pull-up bar.
This guide contains information on how to get started with the pull-up and tips on increasing your strength to the point where you can easily do a series of full pull-ups.
Why is the pull-up necessary?
It is the most robust test of the muscles in the upper body and one of the few exercises that work both the back and biceps at the same time.
Many guys obsess over their best bench press score, but pull-ups are a much better way to measure the strength of your upper body. A strong upper body is functional and able to perform well in the real world.
How to Do a Perfect Pull-Up
- Leap up and grip the pull-up bar with your hands shoulder-width apart and your palms facing away. Hang with your arms fully extended; you can bend your legs at the knee if your bar isn’t high enough to keep your feet from dragging on the ground.
- Keep your shoulders back and your core engaged throughout. Then pull up. Focus on enlisting your lats to lift your entire body upward.
- Move slowly upward until your chin is above the bar, then equally slowly downward until your arms are extended again.
- Aim for ten pull-ups, but be prepared to fall short.
Do not be daunted if the idea of smashing out ten pull-ups seems laughable right now; there are plenty of ways to build up to even your first full pull-up.
Start getting used to your body weight by holding a dead hang for as long as possible without even bothering to pull yourself up.
You can also prep for pull-ups by strengthening your back muscles. Exercises like bent-over dumbbell rows and inverted bodyweight rows will help.
Many gyms will also have assisted pull-up machines, where you kneel on a platform that will give a certain amount of help in raising you, depending on what weight you set it at.
You can also put your foot or knee in a sizeable looped resistance band attached to the bar if you don’t have access to an assistance machine.
Supportive Machine Moves
Lat pull-down
Using a machine to do Lat pull-downs most closely and replicates the muscle actions required to do pull-ups. The wider your hands on the bar, the more you isolate your lats, making each rep harder.
Cable face pull
This works wonders for your pull-up ability by improving your hunched-over posture from too much sitting and making you learn how to retract your shoulder blades properly, which is critical to perfect pull-up form. Do three light sets of 15 after your back or shoulders session.
Negative pull-up
Make a positive effort to up your pull-up max with negative reps. Your muscles are stronger when lowering a weight than lifting it, so at the end of a set, jump to the top, then lower as slowly as possible. Keep going until you can no longer control your descent.
Pull-Up Form Tips
Recruit the glutes
It’s tempting to think of the pull-up as an upper-body move and relax everything below the waist. But squeezing your glutes before you pull up will help you recruit as many muscle fibers as possible.
Use the full range
Using a full range of motion engages muscle fibers and works them harder. Hang from the bar with both hands so your arms are straight. This is the start and finish position. Keep the full-range reps slow and smooth to reduce joint stress.
Get tight at the start.
Bracing your body will engage your big and small stabilizing muscles, making it easier to manage your weight. Keep your chest up and abs and glutes engaged. Initiate the move by retracting your shoulders, then drive your elbows down to pull yourself up.
Squeeze at the top
Once your chin is higher than your hands, squeezing your working muscles will recruit more muscle fibers for greater strength and performance gains. Pause for one second at the top to squeeze your muscles, then lower back to the start.
Mix your grip
Vary between wide, narrow, and hammer grip hand positions to recruit more muscle fibers and correct any weaknesses for greater overall strength.
Break them down
Remove momentum to target all three phases of the lift. Pull your chest to the bar, pause for three seconds, lower halfway, pause, then lower to the bottom, and repeat.
Hang tough
If your grip goes, you go. Get used to hanging from the bar with extra weight until failure, then raising your body weight when doing pull-ups will feel easy.
Pull-Up Mistakes to Avoid
Not Using a Full Range of Motion
The half-rep pull-up is an all too common issue seen in many gyms. Some lifters smash out rep after rep while only descending halfway down before rushing straight back to the top. These half-reps are counterproductive when it comes to maximizing strength and muscle gains.
The shortened range of motion reduces the muscle’s time under tension, which can reduce muscle growth and strength development.
Leave your ego at the door and focus on quality reps over quantity. Lower yourself into a fully stretched position before re-engaging your muscles to lift yourself back up.
Excessive Swinging
Stabilizing the body is crucial for minimizing stress on the shoulder joint. If you are trying to build strength and muscle, excessive swinging will not help and may make things worse in the long run.
CrossFit training has popularized “kipping pull-ups,” a specific exercise variation that has the trainee deliberately swing the lower body back and forth throughout each rep.
This generates momentum, which helps to perform high-rep sets and turns the back-building pull-up into a full-body exercise.
Kipping is a specific technique used for a particular purpose. It’s also a deliberately learned skill; it’s not meant to be an accidental way to perform basic pull-ups.
Focus on the core. While hanging and before pulling, flex your stomach as if you were about to be punched in the gut. Maintain this ab tension throughout each rep.
Benefits of the Pull-Up
The pull-up is a second-to-none vertical pulling exercise. When performed correctly, it can emphasize the development of strength and muscle across the entire upper body, support overall posture, and help general shoulder and upper back mobility.
Getting Bigger and Stronger
Because so many muscles are involved in the exercise, the pull-up delivers a serious bang for your buck. This movement builds muscle through the entire back, shoulders, and arms.
Even the abs get a solid workout. It is also straightforward to overload progressively (you can make it more challenging, often with added weight), making the exercise ideal for building strength.
Carries Over to Multiple Exercises
The pull-up recruits and builds critical muscles in many other lifts. Strengthening these support muscles translates to an improvement in other exercises.
For example, strengthening the lats, upper back, and middle back can carry over to the bench press, where you need to retract your shoulder blades into the bench to create stability and control when pressing heavy weight.
Better Grip Strength
While there are specific exercises to build a stronger grip, simply performing the pull-up strengthens your forearms and grip without additional wear and tear that may occur from more grip-focused exercises like the deadlift. Because you’re hanging from the bar supporting your body weight during each set, your grip strength is being consistently trained from the first rep to the last.
Muscles Worked by Pull-Up
Latissimus Dorsi
The lats are the largest back muscle, attaching to the upper arm and the spine near the lower back. They serve two primary functions. First, they bring the arm closer to the body from out to the side. Second, they get the arm closer to the body from out in front. This is why the lats are heavily activated when your arms begin overhead and pull down and in to raise your body during a pull-up.
Upper Back
The upper back controls the movement of the scapulae (shoulder blades) and supports the shoulder joints under muscular stress, particularly in the bottom portion of the pull-up.
Trapezius
While sections of the traps fall into the “upper back” category, the trapezius is a large muscle on its own and serves a significant role during pull-ups.
Biceps Brachii
The biceps are composed of two heads: a long head commonly referred to as the “outer” and a short head referred to as the “inner.”
The biceps play a relatively more minor but more important role during pull-ups to complete the top part of the movement. They are more significantly activated and play a larger role in the chin-up variation.
Lower Back
Because these muscles control your torso bending at the hips, they work during the exercise to maintain a stable core position and keep a straight line from your shoulders to your knees or feet.
Rectus Abdominis
The abs are surprisingly worked to a very significant degree during pull-ups. While most lifters are more familiar with the abs’ role in flexing your torso in a curled position, they’re highly activated to maintain a stiff, solid torso. Like the lower back, the abs prevent bending at the hips.
How do I get started?
There is lots of advice about pull-ups below that can help everyone, from beginners to experts, master the move. But if you’re looking for an accessible plan to take you from being unable to do one pull-up to being able to complete a set of them comfortably, here’s a beginner’s pull-up program.
Modified Cluster Sets
Some lifters, especially beginners, may not be able to perform pull-ups for multiple sets of multiple reps. Even performing one or two reps may be challenging. This is where cluster sets are beneficial.
Cluster sets allow a lifter to perform multiple low-rep “mini-sets” with a heavy weight while avoiding excessive muscular fatigue.
This modified cluster set method will have three sets of three reps in one cluster. Perform three reps, rest for 15 to 30 seconds, perform another three reps, rest for 15 to 30 seconds, and perform a final group of three reps. That entire series is one set. Take two minutes rest before repeating two more sets.
Because three sets of three cluster reps are comparable to nine reps in a single set, this will allow you to get stronger, maximize the recruitment of high-threshold muscle fibers (specialized muscle fibers that improve power output), and increase total working volume, which can lead to more muscle.
Note: If you cannot perform three reps with good technique, you can use the cluster set method while performing one or two reps per cluster.
FAQs
Can I get a six-pack from doing pull-ups?
No single exercise can give you a six-pack. That can only be achieved through a reduction in body fat, fat loss-focused training, and a calorie-controlled nutrition plan.
Pull-ups, however, may help improve the final look of your abs because they are heavily recruited during the exercise. You can expect a more prominent set of abs once you are lean enough.
When can I start performing weighted pull-ups?
The exact timeframe can vary from individual to individual since some people are capable of performing pull-ups in a very short time. However, once you can accomplish three to four sets of 12 reps using your body weight, you’ve likely built the technique, coordination, and strength to tackle low-rep weighted pull-ups.
How many times per week should I perform pull-ups?
Performing this exercise two times a week will be most effective in building strength and muscle. Make sure you give yourself a few days for recovery between workouts.
You can do bodyweight pull-ups to practice your technique and improve your movement. You can do them as part of your warm-up for upper body workouts or even for workouts where you’ll be doing an exercise that focuses on your back, like deadlifts.