well, crap

[coffeetime]

I'm a week from my birthday. My goal was 10 pull-ups by my birthday. I am still stuck at 5. I have tried switching training tactics but still doing at least negative pull-ups 2x a week. Tried doing my usual 5 this weekend - did it, but realized that's what is making my elbow sore. Went back to the gym tonight and even doing negatives made my elbow sore.

Also had a very, very bad day at work today and I need to put away this chocolate before it gets too late.

So: should I abandon my goal and find a new goal, or give myself another six months and then find a new goal, or something else? What would you do? I was pretty determined, but right now I'd like to have some kind of success in my life...in SOME area, and I'm getting failure in just about every area.

Comments

[weirdquark]

Hm. Try a resistance band for assistance? I've also been stuck at five, with occasionally being able to manage six, for, oh, about six months and it's been super frustrating. It should let you do more reps, which is, well, practice doing pullups for more reps, even if you're not pulling your full bodyweight.

A few weeks ago I started doing New Rules of Lifting for Abs which has you do two sets of eight mixed grip pullups. Plus the extra strength section where you do squats, overhead press, deadlifts, and chinups starting with 8 reps, and then adding weight and doing 6, adding weight and doing 4, and then taking off weight and doing eight again. (Then you repeat the cycle starting at 7, then 6, and finish off with 5, 3, 1, 5, always increasing the weight as the reps go down.) So I found a resistance band, looped it around the pullup bar, and was able to just barely get eight that way. Too soon to tell if it's helping with unassisted pullups because I keep forgetting to test them when I'm not tired, but the assisted ones are feeling easier. I didn't feel like I was just barely getting the eighth rep this morning -- didn't actually try for more, but I think I could have. So that's something. I've also been able to do more wide-grip pullups lately -- still singles, but more of them. No idea if these things are related, but it still feels like improvement.

[weirdquark]

Note: I did test my max pullups this morning and since I lifted yesterday and have been doing a lot of pushups and pullups in small sets lately I wouldn't call myself well rested, but I was still able to get seven pullups, which is a new max for me. Still frustratingly slow progress, but it is progress.

Another thing you might try is throwing five or ten pounds in a backpack/hanging small plates off a belt and then doing multiple sets of one or two reps of weighed pullups. If you can work your way up to five weighted pullups (I have not yet done this, so I have no idea of how long it might take), the unweighted ones should go up too.

[coffeetime]

Seven is GREAT!

I was advised by a male friend to try weight. I hadn't thought of a backpack...the smallest belt at our gym is still big and it slid right off me when I tried it. A backpack is smart!

[coffeetime]

Thanks--I went back to using the weight-assisted machine and with that assist I can do mixed grips, which relieves the elbow thing. I might experiment with doing a larger assist, then taking away assistance gradually until I'm lifting 100% of my own weight, and if I can do that THEN adding weight.

I also recently started doing t-bar rows.

[0jack]

Personally, I'd switch goals or change your time frame. I wouldn't give up on the pull-ups, I'd just let it be for a while. I'd take a break from them entirely for a month while doing other exercises for those muscle groups, then go back to doing them assisted.

I'm not sure what your process has been but I think that going through the motion repeatedly, no matter how much assistance you have, is far more valuable than gets credit sometimes. Do at least ten from a box and then leave your legs out of it more and more, but definitely start with a minimum of ten so that you go through the motion that many times. When you're only using a bit of assistance, push the assistance back up and do twenty instead. Go for that endurance. When you're hardly using the box at all, get rid of it and go for ten. It's possible you're not building up enough of the right muscle fibers to get to ten.

I was watching a video on... I can't remember which one, but it was on pull-ups and kipping and the speaker said "oh, it'll take about five or six years to get good". He was joking, at least somewhat, but that should give you an idea of how long it can take to get these muscles in order. It is okay to take a long time at things. The fact that you keep going back and keep working the way you do is so far from failure... that's your win there. That's huge. I hope you can see that.

[coffeetime]

We do have an assisted pull-up station, I've just been using it without the assist. I put it back last night and added 15 lbs of assist, enough to get more reps in without stressing the elbow much, and I changed grips for every set.

[spaceoperadiva]

Pull ups are hard to advance on. I'm very impressed that you can do 5! I'd give it more time.

Re sore elbows: I got one of those elastic braces to stabilize my unhappy elbow and it works well for me. Well, it works when I can convince myself to wear it, because sweaty/itchy. :/ I have much less soreness and pain when I suck it up and wear it.

[lyorn]

Depending on how what is wrong with the elbow feels, I would give it a rest, and time to heal. Start re-building from a much lower level than your bigger muscles could do to, maybe some physio exercises.

And go back to the pull-ups when your elbow is not complaining that much any more. Sometimes you just cannot get your strenghth into work if some muscle, tendon or joint is the weakest link. (Story of my push-ups.)

Of course it's doubly annoying if strength is the only thing that seems to be halfway successful. Maybe there's some other challenging and interesting exercise to work on?

[coffeetime]

My elbow is really, really weird--it doesn't feel like any elbow problem I've ever had. It feels like I bruised the knobby part of the bone on the inner arm! The first time I felt it, I thought I'd just whacked the elbow into something.

I did mixed-grip pull-ups on the assist station yesterday with a 15-lb assist, and it's only a tiny bit sore today, so I guess this is how I'll have to proceed for a while. Fortunately, it's not sore enough that I have to really back off the way I've done with my knees for the past year.

[rydra_wong]

Belated comment is belated:

How's your elbow doing now? If it's still hurting, it's possible it could be a tendonitis issue.

Fortunately, that's surprisingly easy to treat (being a climber, I have a stash of information on the subject *g*).