What to Do After the First Pull-Up

“Being able to pull up” is a common fitness goal, and if you work hard – with negative pull-ups, inverted rows, and more – you’ll get there someday. Come on, take a moment to celebrate. But don’t quit the workouts you were doing before pulling up.

It’s tempting to change up your workout because for weeks or months (maybe years!) you’ve been doing what you do when you can’t pull up. You may have done negative pull-ups where you start at the top of the movement and slowly work your way down. You may have done inverted rows when pulling up to a low bar or railing. You may have done pull-ups on the machine, pull-ups with bands with decreasing thickness of the elastic band, lat rows, dumbbell rows and much more.

But your first pull-up is not the end of it all. You shouldn’t leave bands and lat machines in the dust. They should stay with you for the next stage of your journey.

You need to fix that first pull up

So you did the pull-up today. It doesn’t mean that you can do it tomorrow. This is probably confusing, so let me explain.

We all have a range of abilities that we can practice on any given day. For example, just because you squatted 225 pounds last week doesn’t mean you can squat 225 pounds today. We can say that your “range” is 200-225, and when you are well rested and tuned, you can reach the top of this range. But even on a bad day, you know you can hit at least 200.

Pull-ups are the same. Perhaps when you started working on the pull-up, your strength was in the range of 50-55% of the strength required for the pull-up. This means that when you do your first pull-up, your range may be around 95-100%. The day you do a pull up is 100% a day. The next day, you may only be 99%. You will wonder why you “can’t” do it anymore.

Now you need to keep working until doing one pull-up is the lower limit of your abilities. If you’re hesitating between doing 0-1 pull-ups, you want to expand that range to 1-3 pull-ups. By the time you can do two to three pull-ups a day, you should be able to do one pull-up on any given day.

By the way, everything I say applies to pull-ups. (In a pull-up, the palms are facing away from you, and in a pull-up, the palms are facing you.) Pull-ups are a little easier than pull-ups, so if you can pull up occasionally , you may already be doing pull-ups fairly consistently. Feel free to mix pull-ups and pull-ups in your workouts.

How to do a second pull up

Getting your first pull-up doesn’t open up a whole new world of training; it just gives you one extra tool. You already have a variety of exercises that you are currently doing to develop pull-up strength, and you can perform these exercises with a variety of rep ranges and difficulty levels. To this you can add “do one pull-up”. This one pull-up is not enough to replace everything else.

If you need to brush up on great pull-up accessories, they include:

• Negative pull-ups (lowering down slowly). You can do this for reps, or you can aim to do each set in one ultra-slow motion, perhaps 10 or 15 seconds.
• Banded pull-ups (with an elastic band supporting your legs—either hanging from a bar or pulled over a bar below you). You can do more reps with a heavier band, or fewer reps with a lighter band. They work best when done in slow, controlled reps.
• Pull-ups on a box or bench , placing one or both feet on the surface under you. Push off with your leg just enough to complete each rep.
• Latissimus lats pull-up machine or pull-up machine with . Both of them engage the pulling muscles of the upper body, although they are not as effective for core or posture training.
• Rows, rows, rows . My favorites are the Kroc dumbbell rows, which are so heavy that you have to “cheat” by twisting your whole body (which is good as it gets your core working). Other great deadlifts include barbell rows, seated cable rows, dumbbell and kettlebell rows, and inverted bodyweight rows. When you’re done with the rest of your pull-up accessories, do a few sets of pull-ups.

Your pull-up program may have included other exercises, such as planks and other core exercises, or maybe even shoulder stretches. Keep doing it too. If you’ve only done one or two things from the list above, feel free to add one or two more.

Don’t think that you have to do them all. Each day, I chose one pull-up variation—negative, band, or leg-rest—and then added two more exercises from the rest of the list (one machine and one row, or two different rows).

How to do more and more reps

Is this the only pull-up you can do at least once in a while? Be sure to do this at the beginning of your workout. One pull-up, rest for a minute or two, then try again. Once you fail, move on to the rest of your workout—negatives, deadlifts, and so on.

If you can pull up more than once a day, you’re closer to doing two or three pull-ups per set. If you’re doing pull-ups and it doesn’t seem difficult, do a second rep. Soon enough you will be doing sets of two or three reps.

Once you learn how to consistently do at least three pull-ups, you can start making it the cornerstone of your workouts rather than a fun bonus. Do three sets of three each day you do upper body exercises, and now you can skip one of your other pull-ups. (However, keep the rows inside.)

For now, if you want something more intense that makes you pull almost every day, consider the Fighter Pullup Program’s 3RM option. Once you can consistently perform sets of five, I would recommend the Armstrong pull-up program instead, which is more stable. And soon enough, you’ll be doing pull-ups instead of just one.