Pull-ups are a landmark exercise, and not really just for climbers. It is a gateway to feeling strong and fit, and often a person’s first pull-up is an emotional experience—especially if it comes in adulthood. They’ve been a staple exercise for climbers of all kinds for generations. In fact, the only references to sport preparation I’ve ever seen from the early mountaineers came in references to hillwalking to prepare for a trip overseas, and pull-ups.
I’ve talked before about my own relationship with the exercise. Struggled with strength as a child. Could not do even one until early high school. The encouragement to try to do a lot of them from older and better climbers. And finally the ability to do way more than was necessary for sport performance.
The pull-up, in fact, is not really the best sport-specific exercise for hard climbing. It is a vertical (or slightly off-vertical) pull of the upper body. In this position, on almost every climb, we’ll have our feet to help us move up the rock. As the rock, and thus our torso, leans to steeper, more horizontal angles, the muscle action required becomes more of a horizontal row. This is a more “essential” strength for climbing, and is underdeveloped in many of us.
Truth be told, the dumbbell row or the inverted row are not very rewarding exercises on their own. Definitely not cool. And so our love of the pull-up remains.
I do feel that climbers should have some serious pulling strength, and pursuing heavier pull-ups for sets of three should be a staple in developmental phases of training. But short of aiming for a heavy single pull or a single arm pull-up, the focus of improvement often slips to doing more reps. Getting to ten. Twenty. Doing your age in reps each birthday.
The problem for most of us comes when we start to trade quality for quantity. Way too often, the last few reps of a set are not pretty and feature some struggling and twisting and kicking. In Terry McMorris’ book Acquisition and Performance of Sport Skills, the author warns against doing bad repetitions of any movement as the athlete fatigues. There is some amount of research that indicates a recency bias in skill acquisition, meaning that our body learns to remember the bad form rather than the good form.
Add to this the fact that going deep into that fatiguing zone ends up limiting the amount of true strength that we gain and extending our recovery duration. We can see that doing too many reps all at once is probably not a great idea.
When I first had the gym, my regular workout partner was an all-around crusher named Nick Czarnecki. He was an engineer by trade but was a fisherman, climber, skier, and more. Nick and I got in early on the CrossFit rage and enjoyed those workouts for close to a year before we started to question whether they were effective or not. We were tired all the time, but neither one of us was getting any better at climbing or getting strong. As we evolved away from that programming model, we continued to dip into specific fitness challenges from time to time.
A memorable session was one in which we tried to do 100 pull-ups as quickly as we could. At the time, I could probably do 15-18 pull-ups in one set. We set the clock and started pulling. Naturally, I tried to get to as close to my max as possible in that first set and probably did 14 or 15 reps. I rested a couple of minutes and then tried again and was only able to do about four reps. I rested again for two or three minutes and then tried again and got the same number. I ended up cranking out lots of sets of two or three, and the challenge ended up taking me well over half an hour.
Much the same way a child goes out hard as they can during a community foot race, I ended up tapping myself out with the very first set. Nick and I decided to repeat the workout, but limit ourselves to just eight reps per set. This worked a little bit better, but it still ended up tapering off toward the end and taking around 30 minutes to complete. The third time we did the session, we were much smarter and planned to do just three repetitions every 20 seconds. The three repetitions took about seven seconds, and then we would have 13 seconds to recover in between. Since the three repetitions never pushed us into that difficult glycolytic energy zone, we felt like we got plenty of recovery during those 13 seconds. We were both able to keep up with the plan of three reps straight through, with both of us finishing in around 11 minutes.
The fascinating thing that came after a few weeks of training harder with fewer reps is that when I jumped up on the bar to see how many total repetitions I could do, I somehow pulled off 21…without ever trying to go to that limit.
Over the years, we’ve seen many variations on this same theme in the gym, but one of the most effective ways we’ve addressed creating more muscular endurance is by asking for more volume at high intensity. A staple of increasing high-intensity endurance and high levels of strength is to do two repetitions of an exercise every minute for 10 to 15 minutes. As an athlete is able to complete all of the prescribed reps at a given load, we will then increase the load very slightly and repeat the session.
If the athlete is patient and willing to go through a series of 10 to 12 progressive sessions, they see significant increases in strength with this crazy side effect of increased muscular endurance as well.
Assuming that the athlete has a goal of muscular endurance, such as winning a pull-up contest, we can start to pull a little bit more focused endurance into the sessions toward the end of a cycle. This can be done by moving up to three reps on the minute for the same duration, or sticking with our two reps but starting to reduce the interval cycle. In this version, we would move to a 55-second clock, then down to a 50-second clock, then perhaps down to a 45-second clock. With these changes, we are not looking to dip into that highly fatiguing middle zone of endurance, but rather encouraging the muscles to improve their “recharge rate,” effectively increasing the available energy more quickly.
For pure muscular endurance, this method works way better than chasing maximum reps in a workout. The biggest problem with getting athletes to train in this way is that it just doesn’t feel right. The work is just not hard enough. We tend to be deceived by our need to feel sweaty and sore and breathing hard when really the building blocks are about being smarter with energy use and maximizing the body’s ability to adapt.
Each month when I review my training, I try to remember what Richard Feynman said about being able to fool ourselves. Just because something destroys me in the gym or I come home from the crag exhausted doesn’t necessarily mean I am going to progress. Improvement needs to be measured by output in the performance environment, not by how I felt on my way there.