Fast and Furious Fitness

Pull ups are an advanced strength exercise. This one exercise is capable of giving you a workout that will fry your ENTIRE upper body, from neck to groin - using just your own bodyweight as resistance.

The exercise in itself is simple, but tough to perform correctly for reps, in proper form, for a lot of folks (so, don’t get disheartened if you aren’t able to do very many of these when you start out). As the name signifies, the goal of the exercise is basically to pull yourself up. Basically, all you need to do is attach a pull-up bar between a doorway, and get going with these. Or, you could do these outside on the monkey bars, or even a tree branch.

There are many ways of doing these - but, I’ll cover the “basic” pullup, which is more than enough for most folks!

- Grip the bar with an overhand grip, and assume a “dead” hang position i.e. you should be “hanging” from the bar, gripping the bar as hard as you can.

- Cross your legs at the ankles, so that your entire weight is being held up by your arms.

(Note: don’t just hang like a limp noodle; make sure you FOCUS on both pulling up, as well as coming down to rep maximum benefits from the exercise).

- Now, pull yourself up in a smooth, slow motion until your chin clears the bar. It is very important not to simply use your arms to pull here - use the muscle “beneath” your armpits. Try flexing this muscle as you hang, and imagine that muscle pulling you up. Those are essentially the lats, which are far stronger muscles than the arm muscles, and training yourself to pull using those will eventually enable you to perform a greater number of repetitions on the exercise.

- While pulling, make sure your back is slightly arched, and shoulders are “rolled back”. This will put a load on the upper back muscles as well as the lats, and will make the entire back stronger.

- Hold for a second, and lower yourself back down to the starting postion under control (don’t just let yourself drop!!). Repeat for as many reps as possible.

- Exhale on the way up, inhale on the way down.

A simple exercise indeed - but enough to provide a superb workout for all levels of trainees. The pull up strengthens the entire back as well as the grip, but due to the intensity of the movements, the chest, triceps, and biceps also get plenty of work - not to mention the core, which will also be worked heavily during this movement.

There are many ways to make this exercise more advanced - but this one variation, used correctly, is enough to fry your ENTIRE upper body in 10-15 minutes (provided you go for multiple sets - and trust me, for most people, it is not easy to keep going after 3 sets of 5 reps). Try it, and you will see!

Rahul