Better suffer the pain of discipline than to suffer the pain of regret
– Jim Rohn
Pull-ups are just such an important and life changing exercise I couldn’t help but write another article about them. And it probably won’t be the last either! If you want to be physically strong there is no escaping it… you have to do pull-ups. A lot of my writing about training is geared around climbing. Are pull-ups the best thing to do to improve your climbing? No, not even close. Will pull-ups augment your climbing skills? Most likely, maybe, a bit. Will pull-ups make you strong however? Totally. There is a lot of information out there in cyberville and elsewhere on pull-ups. Most of the stuff I read seems pretty sound. You just need to pick something that is aligned with your goals and do it. Do it religiously, until it doesn’t work anymore; then do something else.
Recently I have been experimenting with a fairly popular programme that sort of works on a reverse ladder scheme. There are a bunch of different ways that this can be formulated, but I started with a 3RM version. The 3RM meaning… using what weight I can strap on to basically do 3 solid perfect form reps. From there you basically do like I said a reverse ladder along these lines:
| Day | Reps |
| 1 | 3,2,1,1 |
| 2 | 3,2,1,1 |
| 3 | 3,2,2,1 |
| 4 | 3,3,2,1 |
| 5 | 4,3,2,1 |
| 6 | Off |
| 7 | 4,3,2,1,1 |
| 8 | 4,3,2,2,1 |
| 9 | 4,3,3,2,1 |
| 10 | 4,4,3,2,1 |
| 11 | 5,4,3,2,1 |
Once you make it through that (its only 11 days) do something else. That could be as simple as starting over with more weight.
When you get some free time between doing pull-up workouts check out Stevie Haston. That cat knows a thing or two about climbing and a thing or two about pull-ups. That is if you consider doing 1000+ pull-ups in a day; some of them weighted, knowing about pull-ups. Oh yeah at time of writing this, he is about 58.