The Official Pull-Up Checklist (AVOID MISTAKES!)

To perform a picture perfect pullup, there are few things you need to keep in mind. This checklist will lay the foundation for proper pullup form, whether you are working on your first pullup or you’re trying to do even more pullups than you are doing now. In this video, I am going to give you detai

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. What’s that? Sh**.

Sh**. No. I know, Jesse. I fully agree. Oh, you want them to know about pullups?

All right, guys, look. He doesn’t – I agree whole heartedly what you said about Jesse. But he doesn’t think you’re doing your pullups right. So, what I want to do is – I tend to agree. I think pullups are one of those things that are very challenging.

They’re an enigma, really, because they look so easy when everyone knows how to do them. And it can be so damn hard when you don’t know how to do them. But we can make it all easy here today. I’m going to point out the official pullup checklist. What I want to do is show you guys exactly how to do it by covering some of the prerequisites that are going to make it a lot easier for you to do, right now, if you focus on these things.

Number two: the setup. Everything in the setup will determine how the rep itself goes. So, if you get these things right, I promise you’ll get better as well. Finally, the actual rep. How you perform the exercise itself is going to make a big difference in how well you do them.

Finally, one giant caveat that you’re going to want to make sure you pay attention to as it relates to the impact this exercise can have on your shoulder, in a bad way, if you don’t do them correctly. With that being said, let’s start breaking them down, one by one with the help of Raymond. The checklist. To kick off this checklist we have a prerequisite list. These are the things that can enhance your ability to attack the pullup itself.

I want you working on these things because we’re going to have an amazing transfer on your ability to do pullups. The first thing is having stronger abs. Guys, I’ve relayed this story many times here before. When I had my hernia surgery, the most difficult thing for me to do was not doing a plank, or a crunch, or any direct ab exercise. As a matter of fact, I was doing that a couple of days after surgery.

What I wasn’t able to do, even months after the surgery, was hang from a bar and keep my body still. Your abs are heavily relied upon to create stability and stillness under the bar when you hang on it. So, what you need to do is start incorporating more hanging ab exercises into your routine, to start to strengthen your abs in that environment. You’re going to have a tremendous transfer right over to the pullup when you decide to do them. Next, you have to have a strong deadlift.

Now, I know this is a bit counterintuitive. You’re thinking to yourself, “I’m pulling off the floor, versus pulling up overhead? ” The point is, you’re pulling in both environments. The stronger you are at pulling, the better you’re going to be. I put together a complete deadlift checklist video that you’re going to want to check out that covers exactly how to perform the deadlift for maximizing your strength and getting the most out of that lift.

I promise, as you watch your deadlift numbers increase your ability to do more and more pullups will go up as well. Third: scapular strength is one of those elements that people tend to overlook. Your scapulae need to be strong. They need to be stable. One of the best ways you can do this is by improving something we call your ‘straight arm scapular strength’ with an exercise like this.

The straight arm pushdown. Work on including this into your routine and I promise you’re going to develop a lot more stability through your scapula. Which will, as you see quickly here, become very important to your ability to do pullups. Last, you want to make sure your body fat is in check because we know a guy who’s heavier and doesn’t have the strength to match that extra weight is going to have an incredibly difficult time doing pullups. So, having a good strength to bodyweight ratio will always be in your favor.

So, work on getting that body fat down, which will improve your ability to knock out more pullups than you can right now. With that being said, now we’ve got to start the checklist on what you actually need to do when you put those hands on the bar. Now, the setup. When we get to the bar there are some things, we can do here that are going to make the exercise so much easier, if we get them right. It starts with how we grab the bar.

As you see here, I have some options. I could grab with a narrow grip. I could grab with a shoulder-width grip. I could grab with a very wide grip. The fact is, there’s only one grip that’s really good.

That is this one right here. Slightly wider than shoulder-width. Why? Because it places my shoulders in the right position to do a lot of things that are going to be needed in the rest of the exercise. Namely, it gets my elbows out in front of my body.

It puts a bit of stretch onto the lats that will allow us to gain more power from them, and it takes some of the smaller muscles that are ill-equipped to do what we’re trying to do out of the equation. That is, pulling our entire body up to the bar. If I went incredibly narrow, as you see here, most of the focus is going to shift to the forearms and to the brachialis to try and get my body up, and over the bar. They’re not as equipped and strong to do that. I really need to get my lats involved.

To do that, as I’ve mentioned, you’ve got to go a little bit wider. By keeping the elbows out in front of our body, it prevents us from wanting to go too far. You can see as I go too far, my elbow starts to go out toward the sides. Raymond is going to show you why that’s not a good idea in just a little bit. The next thing we can do is talk about the depth of our grip.

Where are you gripping the bar? Are you gripping it in the end of your hand, up in your fingers? Or are you gripping it really deeply here in your palm to do the exercise? Now, I’m going to tell you this, right now: you will do more pullups if you grip it really far away, in this ‘hook’ grip, with your fingers just resting over the top of the bar. But you’re inviting some long term problems.

You’re going to place too much stress on those deep finger flexors that will radiate all the way down in here, placing so much stress on that medial elbow, eventually turning to that really stabbing pain of the medial epicondylitis if you always do them this way. Now, if you’re in a pullup competition and you just have to get as many as you can in a single effort, then I’d probably recommend doing it this far in your fingers. But, if you’re going to do your pullups routinely, and you want to do them right, without irritating your elbow; you’re going to want to grip a little deeper, as you see me doing here. Last, we talk about the position of the legs. Believe it or not, it matters.

Most of us will do it like this. We’ll bend our knees, bring our feet back behind our body, and do our pullups. I’m not really understanding what we’re trying to accomplish by doing that because the weight of our legs is the weight of our legs. We’re not unweighting anything whether we bend them or keep them out straight in front of us. What we are getting when you put your legs straight out in front of you is a plugging of the energy leaks.

This is a concept I’ve covered many times here. It’s a miracle, if you’ve never tried it before. You’ll see instant changes in how many pullups you can do. You position yourself where your legs are out in front of your body. You’re going to actively engage your calves by pointing your toes down toward the ground.

You’re going to squeeze your quads and straighten your knees as hard as you possibly can. You’re going to squeeze your glutes behind you. You’re going to tighten your abs as well. All of these t