Getting More Mileage From Pull-Ups

If you have done pull-ups for a while, they probably aren’t difficult enough anymore to be useful to you. That is, if you don’t use a simple trick to make them a tad more difficult.

So You Mastered The Pull-Up

If you are among those reading this, then you probably already are pretty good at pull-ups, meaning you can do 12 each in three sets.

Should you now continue doing them as usual, you’ll slowly enter the land of training endurance and that means you won’t induce muscle growth. But with a bit of luggage you can make pull-ups much more challenging again:

Go Light

Once more, you don’t need to drop an awful lot of weight into the rucksack to have enough resistance to work against. Even a 2 or 4 lb (1 – 2 kg) plate can make a difference. Go for the weight where you can do at least six and no more than 12 repetitions. When you once again reach 3×12, up the weight another little bit.

The backpack trick, by the way, also works quite nicely for doing negative pull-ups!