How Do I Get My First Pull-Up? Easy Strategies For Strength Gain

Welcome to Frequently Asked Fitness Questions [FAFQ], a series where I answer common questions asked by women embarking on their fitness journeys!

This week: the dreaded pull-up. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably spent a lot of time frustrated that you just can’t seem to get this seemingly simple move. It looks so easy, right?

Well you’re not alone. I spent years grappling with this too, unsure of the best strategy to get from point A to point B. But guess what? With enough time, effort, and dedication, I got there––and you can too!

To save you some time and struggle in your journey, I’ve compiled a list of recommendations on things that worked well for me and things that didn’t (and you should probably stay away from).

Try These Strategies (Pick Your Favorite)

• Watch this excellent intro guide by Meg Squats, which gives some useful practical tips for progressing toward pull-ups.

• If you go to a gym and it has an assisted pull-up machine, try doing 3 sets of 6-8 pull-ups each time you’re there, and decrease the assistance by a little bit each week until you can lift your own weight. In my experience, if you do this for a couple of months, then try to do a normal pull-up, you’ll realize it’s suddenly way easier than the last time you tried!

• Hang a bar in a frequently used doorway of your house and set yourself a requirement that you have to do x amount of any pull-up related exercise (pick one from the video above) every time you pass under it. I typically did 30-second hangs or a set of 3 negative pull-ups, but this is totally up to your preference. (Note that this step is optional, but the more frequently you practice your moves––which is really easy when the bar is right there and not at a gym––the faster you’ll get there). You can find a helpful list of the best home pull-up bars here.

• If you’re feeling burned out with standard pull-up progression techniques,  one way to keep progressing is to do a fun fitness activity that is heavy on back and shoulder strength. This will help you build muscle without even realizing you’re doing it, and you might have a lot more fun than if you just hang on a pull-up bar! Some of my favorites in this area are rock climbing (particularly bouldering, as it focuses more on big strength moves than other forms of climbing) and martial arts (with kickboxing––not the cardio kind, but the real martial art) being my sport of choice here. If you do these for long enough, you’ll go try a pull-up again one day and realize it’s suddenly super easy! However, a word of warning for rock climbing: be very careful, as it is easy to injure yourself if you don’t use proper technique. Learn how to safely fall first, slowly work your way up in climb difficulty, and watch a few simple technique videos before getting too far into it. The YouTube channel Movement for Climbers is a great place to start!

Me at the bouldering gym, building some back muscles!

Don’t Do This

In addition to things you should be doing, you should be careful to avoid some behaviors, as they may hinder your progress:

• Don’t put your pull-up training at the end of every workout. You’ll be exhausted and feel defeated! Do it earlier rather than later so you have maximum strength (or as a separate activity with the bar in your house).
  
• Don’t sag and just let yourself droop from the bar! Pull-ups are all about tension, and one of the reasons you’re struggling might be because you haven’t mastered this yet. While you’re doing your pull-up training, regularly review videos about proper form to make sure you’re following it.
  
• Don’t give up! You may end up getting stuck at a “plateau”, where you feel like no matter how hard you try, you’re not getting anywhere! This happens to everyone and you’re not alone. You can get through it and make progress again, but you can’t give up in the process. If you feel like you’ve gotten stuck and aren’t progressing anymore, the best thing I can recommend is to try a different technique from what you’ve been doing. If you’ve been doing assisted pull-ups, on a machine, switch to an active sport like rock climbing for a little bit. If you like the standard pull-up progressions but are slowing down, try to jump to the next step up. Your body sometimes needs a jumpstart of something new to be able to get you over the hump!

Have you or your friends tried any of these tips? What worked best for you? Share your thoughts in the comments so we can help everyone get their first pull-up!

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For more answers to common fitness questions, see the FAFQ page.

[FAFQ] How Do I Get My First Pull-Up? Easy Strategies for Strength Gain

Welcome to Frequently Asked Fitness Questions [FAFQ], a series where I answer common questions asked by women embarking on their fitness journeys!

This week: the dreaded pull-up. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably spent a lot of time frustrated that you just can’t seem to get this seemingly simple move. It looks so easy, right?

Well you’re not alone. I spent years grappling with this too, unsure of the best strategy to get from point A to point B. But guess what? With enough time, effort, and dedication, I got there––and you can too!

To save you some time and struggle in your journey, I’ve compiled a list of recommendations on things that worked well for me and things that didn’t (and you should probably stay away from).

Try These Strategies (Pick Your Favorite)

• Watch this excellent intro guide by Meg Squats, which gives some useful practical tips for progressing toward pull-ups.

• If you go to a gym and it has an assisted pull-up machine, try doing 3 sets of 6-8 pull-ups each time you’re there, and decrease the assistance by a little bit each week until you can lift your own weight. In my experience, if you do this for a couple of months, then try to do a normal pull-up, you’ll realize it’s suddenly way easier than the last time you tried!

• Hang a bar in a frequently used doorway of your house and set yourself a requirement that you have to do x amount of any pull-up related exercise (pick one from the video above) every time you pass under it. I typically did 30-second hangs or a set of 3 negative pull-ups, but this is totally up to your preference. (Note that this step is optional, but the more frequently you practice your moves––which is really easy when the bar is right there and not at a gym––the faster you’ll get there). You can find a helpful list of the best home pull-up bars here.

• If you’re feeling burned out with standard pull-up progression techniques,  one way to keep progressing is to do a fun fitness activity that is heavy on back and shoulder strength. This will help you build muscle without even realizing you’re doing it, and you might have a lot more fun than if you just hang on a pull-up bar! Some of my favorites in this area are rock climbing (particularly bouldering, as it focuses more on big strength moves than other forms of climbing) and martial arts (with kickboxing––not the cardio kind, but the real martial art) being my sport of choice here. If you do these for long enough, you’ll go try a pull-up again one day and realize it’s suddenly super easy! However, a word of warning for rock climbing: be very careful, as it is easy to injure yourself if you don’t use proper technique. Learn how to safely fall first, slowly work your way up in climb difficulty, and watch a few simple technique videos before getting too far into it. The YouTube channel Movement for Climbers is a great place to start!

Me at the bouldering gym, building some back muscles!

Don’t Do This

In addition to things you should be doing, you should be careful to avoid some behaviors, as they may hinder your progress:

• Don’t put your pull-up training at the end of every workout. You’ll be exhausted and feel defeated! Do it earlier rather than later so you have maximum strength (or as a separate activity with the bar in your house).
  
• Don’t sag and just let yourself droop from the bar! Pull-ups are all about tension, and one of the reasons you’re struggling might be because you haven’t mastered this yet. While you’re doing your pull-up training, regularly review videos about proper form to make sure you’re following it.
  
• Don’t give up! You may end up getting stuck at a “plateau”, where you feel like no matter how hard you try, you’re not getting anywhere! This happens to everyone and you’re not alone. You can get through it and make progress again, but you can’t give up in the process. If you feel like you’ve gotten stuck and aren’t progressing anymore, the best thing I can recommend is to try a different technique from what you’ve been doing. If you’ve been doing assisted pull-ups, on a machine, switch to an active sport like rock climbing for a little bit. If you like the standard pull-up progressions but are slowing down, try to jump to the next step up. Your body sometimes needs a jumpstart of something new to be able to get you over the hump!

Have you or your friends tried any of these tips? What worked best for you? Share your thoughts in the comments so we can help everyone get their first pull-up!

Is WHOOP Worth It? A Comprehensive Guide

 If you’re anything like me and you spend any time in the lifestyle section of YouTube, you’ve probably heard of WHOOP. It’s the newest fad in the fitness tracker market, having exploded in popularity due to extensive marketing by successful YouTube influencers. But what is WHOOP, really? Is it really as good as all the influencers say? And is it worth it to buy one?

WHOOP is a fitness tracker that is purchased via subscription service. It can run you anywhere between $18 and $30 per month ($216-$360/year), depending on how long you sign up for, plus an extra fee if you want a cool colored strap.

What makes WHOOP unique is its focus on sleep, strain, and recovery. 

WHOOP comes with a detailed sleep tracker, which recommends optimal sleep levels based on your activity for any given day, tracks any sleep disturbances, measures sleep cycles, and even your rate of breathing through the night.

Using this sleep data combined with other metrics, it also provides information on your recovery, letting you know each day how recovered you are from earlier activity and how much your body can reasonably do for the day in order to optimize performance and health.

Lastly, WHOOP actively measures the strain you’re putting your body (both mentally and physically) through exercise, work, stress, etc.

That all sounds great, right? But is it really worth the hefty price tag? It depends a lot on who you are and how you’re going to use it.

To help you figure out if WHOOP is right for you, I created this comprehensive flow chart:

WHOOP excels for those who exercise with a high rate / intensity on a cardio-heavy training plan, are at some risk of overtraining, and have flexibility in their schedules and routines. It’s not great for those whose primary focus is fitness motivation (those who are not already deeply invested in a busy training plan), who do not exercise a significant amount, those whose training routines are primarily strength-focused, or those who have rigid schedules. In those cases, other fitness / lifestyle trackers would provide a better value.

If you’re unsure and interested in trying WHOOP out, my recommendation is to go for a 6 month trial––long enough to get the benefit of learning your sleep, strain, and recovery patterns but not so long that you end up with diminishing returns on your investment.

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Do you have a WHOOP? What do you think of it? Comment down below.

Some of Us Will Never Look Like Influencers, And That’s Ok

 In the last handful of years, fitness influencers have popped up everywhere. Women around the world are creating careers out of social media posts where they post selfies of their athletic bodies, advertise fitness products in deals with brands, and share fitness advice with followers who can’t get enough. Some of these women have a massive audience, with millions of adoring fans on social media.

Their online influence gives them the power to shape the lives of young women around the world, providing examples of what the “ideal” body type should be and how to live in order to achieve peak fitness––to be like the influencers now dominating the social media world. 

This sort of inspiration does come with some benefits––primarily the encouragement of women to pursue fitness as a regular activity––but the costs far outweigh them. Influencers encourage fitness, but in a way that creates impossible and destructive standards. 

The feeds of influencers are tirelessly curated, with every pose carefully planned out and every small detail edited in such a way as to produce the ideal look. They are in no way an accurate representation of what most women’s bodies really look like day to day. 

The human body is not designed to look like it does in influencer social media feeds. It just doesn’t work like that. Body weight can fluctuate by multiple pounds per day and stomach bloating is a daily occurrence for many. No matter how hard you try, it’s pretty much impossible to have a toned stomach 24/7.

Even their non-curated bodies are hard to match. For many influencers, fitness is their primary job. They don’t work a standard 9-5 and have increased flexibility––and more resources––for fitness. A 2+ hour daily workout is a productive work session to an influencer, but an impossibility for the average person to fit into their schedule. Influencers often have access to top notch gyms, equipment, and personal trainers that the rest of us don’t. This creates a gap that cannot be bridged

We need to realize that most of us will never look like influencers. No matter how much time I’ve spent at the gym in the past four years, and how much stronger I’ve felt, I’ve never been able to develop defined abs or to get rid of many of my body’s fat deposits. But I’ve come to realize that that’s okay. 

It’s not an easy transition to escape the pull of the influencers, but it is an important one that can have a lot of benefits for your mental health and satisfaction with your fitness routine. It took me a few years to get there, but here’s the main things I did to get out of the cycle:

For many young women, however, this isn’t obvious. The perfectly curated instagram feeds make it look like influencers always have perfect bodies, even though this isn’t true. This false perception can have damaging effects––sometimes very severe––on women’s self-perception, damaging self-confidence and increasing risk factors for disordered eating habits.

1. Unfollowed all fitness-focused influencers on instagram.
2. Reduced time spent on Instagram in general.
3. Went to YouTube to seek out natural athletes who give real, genuine healthy exercise advice. I found the video format far superior to Instagram because it is significantly harder to curate––you can’t tense and pose perfectly in every second of a video, so the audience gets a more natural and realistic example of the day-to-day body of fit people. Plus, there’s lots of great educational content out there.  As a starting point, two of my favorite channels are Meg Squats and Natacha Oceane.
4. Applied that advice to my diet and training.

Since making this transition, I’ve been much happier with my own body image. I don’t look anything like an influencer, but that’s ok because I’m having fun and I feel good (and I still look a lot better than I used to) and that’s really all that matters!

Some Of Us Will Never Look Like Fitness Influencers, And That’s OK

 In the last handful of years, fitness influencers have popped up everywhere. Women around the world are creating careers out of social media posts where they post selfies of their athletic bodies, advertise fitness products in deals with brands, and share fitness advice with followers who can’t get enough. Some of these women have a massive audience, with millions of adoring fans on social media.

Their online influence gives them the power to shape the lives of young women around the world, providing examples of what the “ideal” body type should be and how to live in order to achieve peak fitness––to be like the influencers now dominating the social media world. 

This sort of inspiration does come with some benefits––primarily the encouragement of women to pursue fitness as a regular activity––but the costs far outweigh them. Influencers encourage fitness, but in a way that creates impossible and destructive standards. 

The feeds of influencers are tirelessly curated, with every pose carefully planned out and every small detail edited in such a way as to produce the ideal look. They are in no way an accurate representation of what most women’s bodies really look like day to day. 

The human body is not designed to look like it does in influencer social media feeds. It just doesn’t work like that. Body weight can fluctuate by multiple pounds per day and stomach bloating is a daily occurrence for many. No matter how hard you try, it’s pretty much impossible to have a toned stomach 24/7.

Even their non-curated bodies are hard to match. For many influencers, fitness is their primary job. They don’t work a standard 9-5 and have increased flexibility––and more resources––for fitness. A 2+ hour daily workout is a productive work session to an influencer, but an impossibility for the average person to fit into their schedule. Influencers often have access to top notch gyms, equipment, and personal trainers that the rest of us don’t. This creates a gap that cannot be bridged

We need to realize that most of us will never look like influencers. No matter how much time I’ve spent at the gym in the past four years, and how much stronger I’ve felt, I’ve never been able to develop defined abs or to get rid of many of my body’s fat deposits. But I’ve come to realize that that’s okay. 

It’s not an easy transition to escape the pull of the influencers, but it is an important one that can have a lot of benefits for your mental health and satisfaction with your fitness routine. It took me a few years to get there, but here’s the main things I did to get out of the cycle:

For many young women, however, this isn’t obvious. The perfectly curated instagram feeds make it look like influencers always have perfect bodies, even though this isn’t true. This false perception can have damaging effects––sometimes very severe––on women’s self-perception, damaging self-confidence and increasing risk factors for disordered eating habits.

1. Unfollowed all fitness-focused influencers on instagram.
2. Reduced time spent on Instagram in general.
3. Went to YouTube to seek out natural athletes who give real, genuine healthy exercise advice. I found the video format far superior to Instagram because it is significantly harder to curate––you can’t tense and pose perfectly in every second of a video, so the audience gets a more natural and realistic example of the day-to-day body of fit people. Plus, there’s lots of great educational content out there.  As a starting point, two of my favorite channels are Meg Squats and Natacha Oceane.
4. Applied that advice to my diet and training.

Since making this transition, I’ve been much happier with my own body image. I don’t look anything like an influencer, but that’s ok because I’m having fun and I feel good (and I still look a lot better than I used to) and that’s really all that matters!