Ladder pullup training

[Courtenay]

Hey Sexual Chocolate,

Glad to hear you're making progress. You might also want to try what some refer to as "ladder pullups" -- if you can do 12, do 3, rest 10 seconds or the time it would take a ghost climber to do 3; hop up and do 4, rest the time it would take someone else to do 4, do 5, and so forth until you can't do the next increment, then drop back down to 3, back to 4, etc. until you can't get your 3 reps done. Then rest 5-6 minutes and try again. VERY powerful endurance builder, though you may only want to do 2 or 3 sets, maybe twice a week. Give it a shot.

[texplorer]

Some friends and I do these at the Portland Rock Gym after our fingers are fried. I think they are excellent. You can also find out how many total pull-ups you have done by squaring the number you go up to. For instance, if you build up from 1 to 8 and go all the way back down to 1 again you have done 64 total pull-ups.

[Courtenay]

Texplorer, that's another good way -- called "pyramiding" -- but what I was suggesting is the following: 3 (rest 3) do 4 (rest 4) do 5 (rest 5) until you can't complete the upper number, then drop down again to 3 (rest 3) do 4 (rest 4 etc.) until you fail again, then continue in like fashion until you can't do 3. After trying this in 5-6 workouts, then test your pullup endurance again. I had someone recently increase max reps by 7 pullups over the course of 3 weeks of ladder training and weight-added training.