The Elusive Pull-Up – Try this great progression

The Elusive Pull-Up – Try this great progression

  November 3, 2017

Pull-ups are a tremendously valuable exercise and the best way to achieve them is to follow a good pull-up progression program.  From a functional standpoint, it is your ability to pull yourself up from hanging position.  Maybe it’s just to see something over a wall, or maybe it’s something more life threatening, like pulling yourself up from a cliff!

In your CrossFit workouts, you’ll see pull-ups quite often and if you just keep grabbing that same ol’ band, your improvement will be very, very slow.

The Pull-Up for Strength

The strict pull-up is a STRENGTH movement for most people beginning exercise and CrossFit, and as such you should go through various progressions to achieve that strength.  In addition to being able to master your body weight, the ability to do strict pull ups is also the gateway to many other CrossFit movements:  kipping pull ups, butterfly pull ups, and muscle ups.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to do kipping pull ups if you haven’t achieved your first strict pull up.   Perform these progressions 2 or 3 times a week either before your workouts or after (obviously, you’ll be much fresher if you do them before).  Chris Stroud has an awesome 3x/week pull up progression that you can findHERE.

Today, I’ll introduce you to one of my FAVORITE pull-up progressions: Struggle Up Struggle Downs.

If you have been laboring for too long in “band land”, it’s time for you to add Struggle Up Struggle Downs to your routine.