Heey,
I go to the gym since december. I started at 83,6 kg now I am at 79,4 kg. My goal is about 72 to 74 kg without losing too much muscles.
Right now I cant do a single pull up and I do a upper body lower body split.
Upper body:
- Lat Pulldowns (cable)
- Seated Rows (cable)
- Australian Pull ups
- Push Ups
- Dead Hangs
- Shoulder press (seated with dumbbells)
- bicep curls standing with Dumbbells
- Triceps cable machine
And lower body days I do
Leg press Leg extensions (machine) The other Leg machine that I pull back lol Lunges Knee raises on pull up bar
The wednesday and saturday I do inclined walking at 15% incline and 4 km/h speed for 30 minutes
My thought is losing weight, makes pull ups easier and doing some more bodyweight stuff.
Im scared I will develop disbalance somewhere, am I missing something?
Can’t speak to the whole routine but for pullups I’d suggest negatives first and then banded pullups. Some gyms even have weight assisted pull up machines
I have a weighted machine in my gym but most ppl dont recommend them cause the core isnt actvated
the core isnt actvated
I’m betting 50$ that whomever is telling you that can’t properly explain what they mean by that. You can safely ignore people that talks about “activating the core” as they generally don’t got a clue.
If you want to be able to learn pull-ups, doing machine assisted pull-ups are perfectly fine.
I heard it from Chris Heria and from some other calisthenics youtuber.
Pullups are not a core exercise, so don’t worry about that. The assist will get you to unassisted pullups
If you wanna do X, practice X. In fitness, for almost anything, there’s an easy version of the thing. In this case, negative pullups.
Ok I dont think I can do them yet…
Negatives are just starting at the top of the bar and trying to slow how quickly you drop down. If you can’t do that, then there probably some other fitness priorities you should be focusing on instead.
This was how I was able to do them. It took about 10-15 days of trying before I was able to do one. Once I could do one, I was quickly able to do three. I was topping out at 10 after a month.
I was also losing weight quickly, and had gone from 210lbs to something much smaller. I didn’t have a scale.
You can always do negatives. Put a bar around shoulder height, stand straight, grab it, and slowly lift your legs. You will start to slide down because you can’t hold your bodyweight without putting your legs on the ground. So you’ll slide down. Congratulations, you did a negative pull-up.
While you can, if weak enough or the tendons aren’t used to the motion you can actually cause strain and minor injuries. It depends on the person’s current fitness level, but if negatives don’t feel doable there’s no harm starting even slower with dead hangs and scapular pulls, or even assisted/banded negatives.
I mean you’re literally just standing normally, holding onto something, and then slowly putting weight on what you’re holding onto. I really can’t see how this can go wrong.
Only if you can’t stand or can’t move your arms or something would this not be possible.
Start with just hanging and lowering yourself down slowly.
If you can’t do negatives safely, work on just dead hangs with core activation, and move to scapular pulls just activating the lats.
You can also try inverted rows, where you take something like a bar and do “pull ups” or rows with your feet on the ground and pulling your chest up. Search those up; it’s not an exact one to one, but will help developing strength with a kind of similar motion.
I used to try to improve my pull-ups for a long time with not particularly good results. I switched to doing chin-ups, and I’m starting to see actual improvements in lat strength now.
Then again, I also started doing deadlifts and barbell/dumbbell rows so that might have had something to do with it as well
as a side note, make sure your checking your posture and shoulder flexibility as you do it. many people do them with an arched back. you should be able to hang straight down through the whole motion while doing them. that’s the part i struggle the most with.
set your back flat against the wall and slowly raise your arms up from the side keeping them flat against the wall. if your back or arms need to lift off the wall at all as you reach all the way up you should work on your flexibility as well.
There’s no problem with doing pull-ups with an arch. It’s just a different variation that uses a different set of muscles. Most people find it easier to pull with an arched back.
One way to start is to have someone or some thing hold your legs up while you do them, assisted pull-ups. Each time after, try to do as many solo pull-ups as possible, followed by assisted pull-ups.
Continue this routine until you are able to do them comfortably up to a specified amount.
