The Question

What should my goal be instead of a pull-up? -BT

The Answer

If you didn’t already read my post from Friday on why pull-ups are hard, it’s useful context for why I think a pull-up is not an amazing near-term goal for someone new to strength training, and why we might want to all think a little differently about pull-ups. I’ve also written about doing pull-ups before in at least two past columns.

But the fact that a pull-up is the devil’s goal doesn’t mean there aren’t many, many incremental and useful goals between “never strength trained before” and “doing a whole pull-up” that are good and worthwhile. Things like being able to lat-pulldown 70% of your body weight, or do a 30-second negative, or even a 10-second negative, or three sets of feet-supported pull-ups, are all great intermediate goals, which we will get all into in a minute.

Part of my emotional damage/bias here is that, as I said, I got all the way to doing a pull-up and I don’t enjoy pull-ups. The classic rule in strength training is that whatever you hate doing is probably what you need to be doing more of in order to continue to grow; this is almost certainly true in this case, and I HATE it. But any time I train long enough to get to five pull-ups, I’m not really moved to train them any harder.

This is for a combination of reasons: I don’t like the training, and five pull-ups feels like plenty. Five regulation pull-ups in ideal circumstances feels like it should be more than enough to get me to a single bodily pull-up on any terrain, including pulling myself to safety out of a live volcano. You may feel differently about your survivability-to-regulation-pull-up ratio; the number of pull-ups that, for you, equate to a sufficiently stocked bomb shelter may be ten. It may be twenty. That’s your journey. For me at the moment, it’s five. I like to be able to do five pull-ups on demand, no more and no less. I actually think that’s a decent number of pull-ups, and I can speak to getting to that point.