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]

That's awesome.

I'm actually working on a pull-up program. I'm doing grease the groove with both band-assisted pull-ups and (full) push-ups.

[rydra_wong]

Having a program is fun! How are you finding it?

I'm currently doing the Twenty Pull-ups program, which seems to be a website sponsored by a pull-up bar manufacturer and has ripped off the plan from the principles of the various "[X number] of [Y exercise]" plans, but it's a decent plan and seems to be boosting my numbers (though not as sharply as the plan thinks they should, so I'm going to be re-doing some weeks at a different level).

There's also the fighter pull-up program, which I might try at some future point (though not every day, because I know that would work badly for me).

I can always use the extra upper body strength for climbing (I am weak relative to most people I climb with), so wanted to see if I can give it a bit of a boost, especially as I'm going on a climbing trip at the end of the month.

Oh, side-note: some people (I am one of them) find they get elbow tendonitis from doing lots of pull-ups.

This is actually incredibly fixable -- there's a set of specific rehab/prehab exercises which have a magical effect (Sekrit Climber Knowledge! okay, just stuff that doesn't seem to be so widely known outside the elbow-tendonitis-prone climbing field). I knew doing a pull-up program would make my elbows stressed, so I just spend a few extra minutes doing said exercises to keep my tendons happy.

If you get any elbow twinges (hopefully you won't), let me know and I'll start throwing links at you. *g*

[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