The Pull-Up Protocol
From the She’s A Beast March 2022 Ask A Swole Woman newsletter. Download the Pull-Up Protocol spreadsheet here.
The Question
What should my goal be instead of a pull-up? -BT
The Answer
If you didn’t already read my post from Friday on why pull-ups are hard, it’s useful context for why I think a pull-up is not an amazing near-term goal for someone new to strength training, and why we might want to all think a little differently about pull-ups. I’ve also written about doing pull-ups before in at least two past columns.
But the fact that a pull-up is the devil’s goal doesn’t mean there aren’t many, many incremental and useful goals between “never strength trained before” and “doing a whole pull-up” that are good and worthwhile. Things like being able to lat-pulldown 70% of your body weight, or do a 30-second negative, or even a 10-second negative, or three sets of feet-supported pull-ups, are all great intermediate goals, which we will get all into in a minute.
Part of my emotional damage/bias here is that, as I said, I got all the way to doing a pull-up and I don’t enjoy pull-ups. The classic rule in strength training is that whatever you hate doing is probably what you need to be doing more of in order to continue to grow; this is almost certainly true in this case, and I HATE it. But any time I train long enough to get to five pull-ups, I’m not really moved to train them any harder.
This is for a combination of reasons: I don’t like the training, and five pull-ups feels like plenty. Five regulation pull-ups in ideal circumstances feels like it should be more than enough to get me to a single bodily pull-up on any terrain, including pulling myself to safety out of a live volcano. You may feel differently about your survivability-to-regulation-pull-up ratio; the number of pull-ups that, for you, equate to a sufficiently stocked bomb shelter may be ten. It may be twenty. That’s your journey. For me at the moment, it’s five. I like to be able to do five pull-ups on demand, no more and no less. I actually think that’s a decent number of pull-ups, and I can speak to getting to that point.
Here is the thing about overhead vertical pulling work: It is good for you. It’s one of the major planes of movement (vertical/horizontal pull/push). Doing it will help keep your body in balance. But in a lot of programs, there is a hefty fixation on pull-ups, and many of them don’t even think twice about whether even beginners can do a single pull-up or chin-up. I vividly recall Starting Strength saying something along the lines of “just add in some chin-ups” to the program after a few weeks of work.
It’s possible to work up to pretty significant weights on the most adjacent movements known to humankind, like the pull-up negative, the lat pulldown, the banded pull-up, and STILL not be able to do a single pull-up. In the process of getting my pull-up, I was overreaching so far, much farther than I thought I would have to, before I was able to do a single pull-up. There were also lots of movements that I was not doing early on that would have helped.
Secondarily, by the time I got my pull-up, it was a war of attrition. By that I mean, by the time I could “do a pull-up,” I believe my pull-up form was pretty ass. I could definitely get my chin over the bar, but only wrenching my forearms and collapsing my chest and cramping my traps, and my lats really never entered into the picture (probably ultimately more like a chin-up than a pull-up, but with an overhand grip). I don’t think I tried very hard to do them “right,” which made doing them ultimately harder in general, and is likely a big factor in why I continue to sort of resent them today.
A post shared by Casey Johnston (@swolewoman)
How to integrate this into LIFTOFF
On weeks you have lat pulldowns programmed twice, sub in the Day A and Day B workouts for your lat pulldowns.
On weeks you have lat pulldowns programmed only once, perform Day A in place of your lat pulldowns, and choose one additional day that week to add in your Day B workout.
The Pull-Up Protocol
So here are all the moves we’ll be using:
This is the best place to start, if only because if you can’t hang onto the bar, you can’t do a pull-up.
Top holds (and feet-supported top holds)
The top hold is, to me, the most underrated movement. possibly because it’s hard get up to the top of pull-up bars when you can’t do a pull-up (by jumping or finding something to stand on). It’s worth it. But also! It’s fine to mix in some top-hold practice on a barbell positioned at a height such that your feet can touch the floor. Sure, this is cheating, but how else are you going to learn where all the parts of your upper body should be at the top? At the top you should be lats engaged, elbows under bar, shoulder blades heading for your back pockets, chin above the bar, and the rest of your body weight hanging as accurate to real life as you can manage while you are cheating.
I’ll be honest; I hate these. They feel dumb. I will do almost anything else including chewing my own arm off. That probably proves that I am supposed to be doing them more than anything else, and it’s probably the most important thing to learn to do in terms of form.
These have a lot of haters, in part because the band is taking the most work out of the bottom of the pull-up, which is the “hardest” part. You have to look at these as, not for building good volume, but for practicing the overall motion, where your arms and face and chest go.
Similar to the top holds, these would be pull-ups with your legs or feet resting on the floor (if you do your pull-ups from barbell in a rack vs a full-height pull-up bar), a box, or some other surface. Again, useful as baby steps for learning to support your weight and track your up-and-down movement as well as you can.
These seem like they won’t be that helpful, because you’re going backwards. Wrong. They are likely the most helpful thing I ever did. I will say they kind of fucked my form a bit, because you can fake the overall motion of a negative if you are, as I mentioned above, doing the whole thing with your forearms and traps and nothing else. Negatives might have gotten me from a dead hang to a chin over the bar, but my pull-up was kind of shit. Try and make sure you are doing them properly; that JTVK video is a good primer on what a good pull-up looks like.
As I mention in the LIFTOFF materials, this is a top exercise that even a noob will do in the gym, because it seems so straightforward. Not unlike negatives, you can bring the bar down below your chin on the lat pulldown machine, but that doesn’t make what you did a lat pulldown. In a lat pulldown, you should be leaned back, chest up, using your lats, directing elbows and shoulder blades to your back pockets. Even a heavy lat pulldown will leave your pretty far from a pull-up, but good form is the best way to make sure that that strength ends up amounting to a pull-up, and it’s a good way to accumulate volume once you’ve done some heavier technique work.
This is just as much of a pull-up as you can do, starting from the bottom. These aren’t super helpful or satisfying until you can do a decent bit of one rep, but once they are helpful, they are very helpful, because training the bottom of a pull-up rep matters.
A fun fact about many of us, particularly those who didn’t come into this super strong in the upper body or with no training history, is that you can probably handle more volume more frequently than you think. If (if!) you have upper-body strength goals like doing a pull-up, it’s worth trying more upper-body training and more sub-failure sets on more days, and even maybe going to failure a little more often, and seeing how they handle it progress-wise.
If it doesn’t work for you and just makes everything break down, you can always stop. But the main thing holding me back in terms of upper body training was not energy; it was fear of having a big back and arms. Seven years later, I still don’t have a big back and arms.
If you have a super-high volume/hypertrophy-focused program (more here on what that is), you might not want to try and do this on top of everything else you’re doing; you should swap out an upper-body movement or two on each day you add this stuff in. For instance, if you are doing GZCL four days a week, six movements a day, you should just do these as T3 accessories so you’re still doing six movements total, not add them in on top. Other dimensions of work might suffer while you’re working on your pull-up, but that’s okay.
I also would not suggest doing this on top of the early months of a linear progression program like LIFTOFF; get your strength base a little further under you first. Also note that if you do do it during a linear progression, those are usually balanced so you can be progressing-ish in all the lifts for a while; adding in more of a different movement may steal some energy and focus. Just don’t be upset if, say, your squats or bench start going up a little more slowly while you’re practicing your pull-up stuff.
A post shared by Casey Johnston (@swolewoman)
Progress
Keep track of your reps or seconds on timed sets, and seek to add reps or seconds. When you get to 12 reps or 30 seconds, add weight/increase difficulty. In the case of feet-supported pull-ups, move your feet inward/move the bar higher so less and less weight is supported on the ground. In the case of banded pull-ups, start with a tightly wound or knotted-around-the-bar band, and undo your knots, or use a lighter band. For dead hangs, top holds, and negatives, you might start out with sets of literally one second; that’s okay. Just seek to add time every session or week. Rest between these sets as you would for other lifts (30s-1 minute, or until you feel ready, is likely more than fine at this beginner stage). If any movement involves starting from the top, you should jump or climb to the top, and are obviously not expected to “pull up” to the top; otherwise you’d be doing a pull-up.
Unless noted, do sets to RPE 8 (not quite to failure). If you aren’t sure how close you are actually going to failure, try going to failure once every few weeks.
Each “week” here is two days of programming. You should do this stuff AT LEAST two days a week (i.e. Day A once a week, Day B once a week), and more ideally three days a week, alternating the two days (Day A Monday, Day B Wednesday, Day A Friday, Day B Monday, and so on, or whatever days you do your workouts). This would mean you are doing additional pull-up work every workout day on a three-day-a-week program, or three of your days in a four- or five-day-a-week program. It does not super matter whether you program them with or against existing upper-body days. You can also start by doing this only two days a week, and as you work into Week Three of each Phase, bump it up to three days a week.
Phase Zero
Week One: 2x lat pulldowns OR dead hangs OR feet supported pull-ups
Week Two: 3 sets
Week Three: 4 sets
Keep going with Week Three until you can do 10 lat pulldowns at 30% bodyweight, 15s dead hangs, or 10 feet-supported pull-ups.
Phase One
Day A
Move 1: feet-supported pull-ups to RPE 8
Move 2: dead hangs to max effort (til you can’t anymore, up to 30 seconds; one set is one hang)
Day B
Move 1: lat pulldowns to RPE 8
Move 2: dead hangs to max effort
Week One: 2 sets of each
Week Two: 3 sets of each
Week Three: 4 sets of each
Keep going with Week Three until you hit 40% of your body weight for 12 reps on pulldowns or 30s dead hangs for all sets.
Phase Two
Day A
Move 1: negatives to max effort
Move 2: feet-supported pull-ups
Day B
Move 1: scapular pull-ups
Move 2: lat pulldowns
Week One: 2 sets of each
Week Two: 3 sets of each
Week Three: 4 sets of each
Keep going with Week Three until you hit 50% of your body weight for 12 reps on pulldowns or 10s negatives for all sets.
Phase Three
Day A
Move 1: negatives to max effort, holding as long as possible at the top specifically on the last set
Move 2: lat pulldowns
Day B
Move 1: banded pull-ups, with a top-hold on the last rep of the last set
Move 2: scapular pull-ups, with a “top”-hold on the last rep of the last set (scapulae fully engaged/depressed, funny that those are synonyms here)
Week One: 2 sets of each
Week Two: 3 sets of each
Week Three: 4 sets of each
Keep going with Week Three until you hit 60% of your body weight for 12 reps on pulldowns or 20s negatives for all sets.
Phase Four
Honestly, try a pull-up at this point and see how you do. Rest, then do one absolute max-effort negative, and record how many seconds it is.
Day A
Move One: partial pull-ups (as high as you can go)
Move Two: banded pull-ups, with a top-hold on the last rep of the last set
Day B
Move One: negatives for 50% of your max effort time, as many reps as you need to get to RPE 8 or until you can’t hit the 50% time
Move Two: lat pulldowns
Week One: 2 sets of each
Week Two: 3 sets of each
Week Three: 4 sets of each
Keep going with Week Three until you hit 70% of your body weight for 12 reps on pulldowns or 30s negatives reps.
If you can’t do a pull-up at this point, I would be sort of surprised. This also might look like only a 12-week program, but I imagine virtually everyone will need to marinate in each phase for some time at the Week Three stages. If you repeat Week Three 6 times, deload back to Week One and work your way back up (but keep doing your increased weights/times/reps).
Things that may additionally help depending on what you struggle with—
Lat activation: Standing straight-arm pulldowns
These are not just standing lat pulldowns; rather, you’re learning to activate your lats and tuck your shoulders. You can do these for super light weight. It’s just practicing a motion that your lats need to be able to do in many things.
Grip: More grip stuff
Rows, farmers’ carries, walking lunges are all good ways of practicing hanging onto stuff. If you do conditioning, work in the latter two.
Core: Core stuff
A lot of people love hollow holds for pull-up practice. I don’t care for them; doing core work for pull-ups feels like cleaning the bathroom in order to write your Great American Novel. They can yammer on about how the Vitruvian pullup is done with legs totally static and core engaged, and while I’m willing to be a hardass about dead hangs, directing your chest to the bar, and getting your chin over the bar, I simply don’t care what’s going on below anyone’s waist. But whatever, if you find it helpful, it’s a commonly-recommended activity. You could probably get an equal amount of mileage out of any core work, like planks or dead bugs.