Social Workout

Achieving a Pull Up - "It's all in your head"

There is some of truth to the cliche that achieving the goal of completing one pull up "is all in your head".  

But judging from princessmichelle's reaction to my telling her this at the gym the other day, I think this requires further elaboration.

So here we have nfolkert's unsolicited explanation of how muscles work and how to achieve the pull up goal if you can't do a pull up:

A caveat:  All of nfolkert's knowledge of weight training comes from the conventional wisdom of the internet.  While this has served him reasonably well in achieiving his own pull up goals, take it all with a grain of salt.

First, let's examine how muscle contraction works.  There are several things going on physiologically when you attempt a complex movement such as a pull up, which recruits dozens of muscles for the direct effort, stabilization, and control required.  One component in performing the movement is the capability of the muscle fibers to exert the force required.  This is dependent upon the number of muscle fibers, which has a genetic component and is affected by long-term strength training and nutrition.  But another important component is the capability of the nervous system to signal and coordinate the muscles.

To contract a muscle, the nervous system must send an electrical signal to the muscle.  To maintain a contraction over time and distance requires the nervous system to send many electrical signals to the muscle.  To perform this against significant resistance (such as your body weight) requires the nervous system to send many very strong electrical signals to the muscle in order to recruit the maximum number of muscle fibers.  And to recruit many muscles in concert requires the nervous system to coordinate all those electrical signals correctly between multiple muscle groups.

Without training, your nervous system doesn't like to do all this on its own.  In part this is adaptive -- there are several inhibitory impulses that protect the body against injuring itself.  The body limits recruitment of muscle fibers to prevent avulsion, which is the tearing of tendon and bone by over-exertion of muscle force.  Also every muscle has an opposing antagonist muscle that works in concert with it to control a movement to prevent damage to joints.  And in part the nervous system just may not have worked out the most efficient way to coordinate the movement of the different primary and synergistic muscles to get the best leverage for the movement.

Resistance training helps the nervous system learn how to coordinate the muscles for the movement desired, fine tune the antagonist muscles to avoid working against the desired movement, and overcome neural inhibitions to sending frequent, strong electrical signals to recruit more muscle fibers.  The body is a little over-protective by nature, so I wouldn't worry about ripping apart any of your bones at this stage of resistance training, but it is interesting to note that highly trained athletes can injure themselves in this way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avulsion_fracture).

So, to say "it's all in your head" is not exactly accurate, as people will tend to interpret this as "You don't have the willpower to do a pullup!".  It is more correct to say that "it's all in your nerves".

Or at least a good portion of it, particularly during the first six weeks of a resistance training program, when strength gain is dominated by neural adaptation (the nervous system learning to send strong, frequent, and coordinated signals to the muscles involved) rather than muscular hypertrophy (increase in number of fibers and fluid/energy supply to the muscles).  So if you are worried about "bulking up" if you lift weights, this should be of some comfort, given that the challenge has only four weeks left.

So what advice does the conventional weight training wisdom that nfolkert has gleaned from the internet give for achieving the pull up goal?  The best way to achieve rapid neural adaptation is to do multiple sets (5-10) at low reps (1-3) close to or at (80-100%) your one-rep-max, pushing your one-rep-max each time you work out.

Your one-rep-max, as one might guess, is the maximum resistance at which you can do a single repetition.  Obviously, if you cannot currently do one pull up, were you to strengthen yourself to the point that you could do exactly one pull up, you would be doing a single repetition at your one-rep-max.  So your goal is to increase your one-rep-max to at or above your body weight on an exercise that uses the same muscle groups as a pull up. 

The other advice that internet weight training wisdom gives is that including eccentric contraction as well as concentric contraction in your exercise will give better short-term strength gain than concentric contraction alone.  Huh?

Quick explanation: when you lift a weight up and then set it back down, the weight is providing gravitational resistance the entire way up as well as the entire way down.  On the way up, your muscle exerts force to shorten itself.  This is called concentric contraction.  On the way down, your muscle exerts force to control the descent even as it returns to its normal length.  That is, it exerts force to avoid lengthening at a faster rate.  This is called eccentric contraction.

So my advice, gleaned from years of internet self-research, on how to train for doing a pull up, to take the most advantage of strength gain from neural adaptation and from eccentric contraction is as follows:

• Train on a pulldown machine.  Mainly because it's easier to track exactly what weight you're doing.  You can do the same on an assisted pull up machine by subtracting the assistance from your body weight to get the resistance, but your body weight can vary significantly over the course of a day, and I find that the assistance machines impart a good deal of their own momentum to the movement, so it is harder to accurately predict exactly what the resistance is.  The motion of a pulldown machine is in line with gravity, so I usually find pretty exact correlation between the weight I put on the plates and the equivalent resistance in a free unassisted pull up.  This kind of goes against the feral philosophy, unfortunately.
• Find your one-rep-max.  You can do this by experimenting at different weights to find when you can only do one rep, or by finding a moderately challenging weight, doing as many reps as you can, and using one of the formulas for estimating one-rep-max.  The simplest is to divide the number of reps by 30, add 1, and then multiply by the weight in pounds.  So if you can do 10 reps at 100 pounds, your one-rep-max is ((10/30)+1)*100 = 133 pounds.
• Do 5-10 sets of 1-3 reps each workout at 80%-100% of your one-rep-max.  This gives you the best bang-for-buck in terms of neural adaptation.
• Lift the weight and then lower it slowly over the course of maybe 10 seconds or 3-4 breaths to get a good eccentric movement.  This gives you the best benefit from eccentric contraction.
• Each workout try to increase the weight you do, because your nervous system will be learning to send more effective signals to your muscles.

Give yourself a rest day when your back and biceps are tired.  Once your one-rep-max on the pulldown machine is above your body weight, you have the neural and muscular capacity to do a pull up, though bear in mind that the muscle recruitment is not exactly the same (a free, unassisted pull up mainly uses lats and biceps -- same as pulldowns or assisted pull ups -- but also recruits other muscles such as the abs for stability), and there is a little psychological hurdle (this part really is "in your head"), but you should be able to psyche yourself up and overcome it.

A side note for those who don't have access to pulldown machines or assisted pull up machines.  Your muscles are about 10% stronger on eccentric contraction than concentric.  So even if you can't do a pull up, you may be able to do a controlled descent -- a "negative pull up" -- by jumping up to a contracted position and then lowering yourself slowly down.  You already got this advice on the Pull Up challenge page, but the stuff above is justification for why you'd want to do that.