This is my kind of fitness essay

[rydra_wong]

From The Hairpin:

Melinda Misener: How To Do Pull-ups

Occasionally I tried to do unassisted pull-ups. Halfway up, I’d get stuck. The feeling wasn’t as painful as it was puzzling. Up, I told myself. Go up.

In time I saw that this stuckness, rather than any physical pain, was what made me so reluctant to try. I wondered how many times I’d overlooked powerlessness as the source of my discomfort. I philosophized: was it wiser, in general, to make peace with impotence or resist it by any means possible?

Comments

[daedala]

It's not a very planned sort of program -- I just go to the pullup bar whenever I remember (as long as it's been at least an hour) and do some pullups with the band. But I end up getting 20-30 per day, 3-4 days per week, so that's good. I could do more than I am, I want to really feel I have the motion down. I'm working on activating the lats & hollow body position. The interesting thing is that my body now reminds me to do this -- hey, I'm antsy, I wanna do some exercise -- throughout the day.

I would love to see the tendon exercises, just in case! I use the term "pullups" kind of loosely, though -- I am actually doing the biofeedback stuff I mentioned in an earlier post to pick which grip I use, and usually do neutral grip pullups. So for it's not an issue, but that can always change!

[rydra_wong]

The interesting thing is that my body now reminds me to do this -- hey, I'm antsy, I wanna do some exercise -- throughout the day.

Oh, that's really cool. It's nice when you can play something intuitively like that.

I would love to see the tendon exercises, just in case!

http://www.drjuliansaunders.com/index.php/download_file/-/view/28/ -- this is the pdf which fixed my elbows when I was a n00b climber and climbed my way right into elbow tendonitis/osis, as so many of us do.

Magic stuff, heavily cited and endorsed in the section on elbows in Make or Break, the state-of-the-art book on climbing injuries that just came out.

Dave MacLeod's blog review of the research knowledge about why this stuff works and what exactly it's doing:

http://onlineclimbingcoach.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/golferstennis-elbow-etc-what-eccentrics.html