Back day is one of the best day of the week. If you disagree, take a number and form an orderly line. Almost nothing hits higher than inflating your lats, traps, and yoke with a skin-tearing pump and crab-walking sideways out of the load room. Heck, blast your lats hard enough and you may probably fly home.
But a back workout is just nearly as good because the movements inside. When it involves one of the best back exercises, pull-ups (and chin-ups) often rank quite high, and rightfully so. But I’ve got a bone to select with the pull-up, especially as the primary exercise in a back workout.
They’re an awesome exercise, but in case you’re attempting to beef up your back hypertrophy, stop doing pull-ups at the beginning of your workouts. I promise you’ll fly higher.
Why You Shouldn’t Start Back Workouts With Pull-Ups
When you take a look at the technical aspects that characterize the pull-up — what you would like your body to physically do — you’ll notice that the case for pull-ups on back day isn’t rock solid. In fact, the standard pull-up is hanging on by a thread.
1. Pull-Ups Are Unstable
Pull-ups rely almost exclusively in your upper back, but they destabilize your lower half. If you don’t always squeeze your abdominal muscles and contract your lower body, it’s easy to start out swaying forwards and backwards on a pull-up bar such as you’re at a CrossFit class.
- One study from 2013 regarded chin-ups as “more functional” than the lat pulldown exercise, measured by global muscle activation. (1) “A little bit little bit of muscle activation all over the place” isn’t what you wish in case you’re training for hypertrophy.
You can treatment this by developing exceptional pull-up technique. Yet the very fact stays that worrying about your core, hips, and legs during a back exercise is a muscle-building liabilitynot an asset.
For a fast fix, try using the assisted pull-up machine without inserting the pin into the plate stack. It’ll give your legs something to rest on so you may focus harder on contracting your back, but won’t offset your weight.
2. Pull-Ups Have a Poor Resistance Profile
This is maybe the realm wherein pull-ups are least defensible. The pull-up’s resistance profile, to be frank, sucks. During a bodybuilding workout and unless you’re intentionally pre-exhausting a muscle, you need to apply tension broadly across the muscles you’re training. Save the isolation work or partial range of motion moves for the tip.
- An exercise’s “resistance profile” refers to how the resistance you’re working with is dispersed across that movement’s range of motion. Human muscles are likely to be weakest after they’re fully contracted, which is why pull-ups are easy to start out but hard to complete.
For most individuals, the primary half of the range of motion is simply too easy, while the second half is exponentially harder. High-effort pull-ups demand an excessive amount of upper back extension too early into the workout in case you perform them first, limiting your ability to execute other pulling exercises properly.
You’d higher serve your muscle-building goals by starting back day with something more consistent like a lat pulldown and even dumbbell row.
3. Pull-Ups Fry Your Grip
The purpose of a back workout is to grow (and strengthen) your back. Regrettably, your back muscles attach to your scapula and humerus, which attaches to your radius and ulna, which attach to your scaphoid and lunate … you get the concept. You have to hold the weights.
This has incorrectly led to a typical ego-driven misconception; in case you can’t hold onto the bar, the load is simply too heavy for you. While that concept is more false than true, you may’t deny that pull-ups are a damn-good forearm exercise, especially for heavy-set folks or anyone with the gusto to hold a weight plate from a chained belt. But a forearm workout isn’t what you wish on back day.
The very last thing you need to do is start your workout with an exercise that torches your grip strength. Is it the largest deal on the planet, or an issue unique to the pull-up? Not necessarily, but it surely’s value mentioning.
You can easily work around this issue by doing pull-ups with lifting straps, but not everyone enjoys using straps.
4. Pull-Ups Are Too Easy for Some, and Too Hard for Others
Bodyweight exercises play by different “rules” than free weight lifting, mostly as a result of the physics involved. When you perform cable exercises or work with machines, you most likely end up fatiguing steadily over the course of multiple sets, even in case you’re working at pretty high intensities.
That’s not the case for the pull-up. One set of true RPE-10 pull-ups will demolish most individuals and diminish their ability to perform well on subsequent sets. Moreover, big-bodied folk or anyone on a bulk might find the pull-up frustrating to use progressive overload to.
A 210-pound athlete may also burn through rather more of their grip endurance doing pull-ups than a 140-pound athlete.
The Case for Pull-Ups
There’s loads of PubMed-inspired justification for not putting pull-ups at the beginning of a workout, but alternatively, there’s a bodybuilder on the market with a much larger back than I’ve got who has begun his workouts with pull-ups for the last decade. Case closed.
Luckily, that’s not how it really works. Heck, there’s probably an excellent larger guy on the market who never does pull-ups of any kind. There’s all the time an even bigger guy. So, when you start your back workouts with pull-ups? Well, in case you’re attempting to…
Stop Starting With Pull-Ups, or Else…?
Bodybuilding exists in an odd place; it’s science-based but not as empirical as spreadsheet-driven powerlifting training. Golden-era bodybuilders would call their sport an intuitive, artistic pursuit, despite the fact that muscle-makers must obey human physiology.
On paper, starting a back workout with pull-ups has more cons than pros. In the actual world, plenty of individuals have built some damned-impressive backs by heading to the pull-up bar as soon as they set foot within the gym.
If you’re frustrated with the standard of your back workouts — or your back, which looks more like a salt flat than a mountain range — those pull-ups you’ve begun every session with may be partially responsible. Try putting them at the tip of your lift as a workout finisher as an alternative, and even go for some long-length partial reps, since that technique suits the pull-up pretty much.
Ultimately, in case you’re a bodybuilder, do not forget that there’s no must-do exercise, and of movements fail to live as much as their very own fame (I’m taking a look at you, deadlift) relating to packing on mass.
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References
- Doma, K., Deakin, G. B., & Ness, K. F. (2013). Kinematic and electromyographic comparisons between chin-ups and lat-pull down exercises. Sports biomechanics, 12(3), 302–313.
