Wednesday Strength Day!
New plan today folks…we’re going to tackle a sensitive subject with you all….Pull ups. What a PITA (look it up if you don’t know what that means 🙂
But first, squatting…goblet squats for load supersetting with core work.
Then….and you WILL COMPLY (LOL!)…we’ll start drilling down your pull ups. And here’s the deal. In order to start working on pulling vertically, especially with our age demographic (did I mention that “you will comply?”), we’ll set some standards. What are standards? Well, every squat you perform above parallel and/or don’t reach full hip extension at the top counts as zero. Every squat you do that IS below parallel AND your hips are at full extension at the top counts as one. Make sense? Same with pushups – every time your chest (pecs, nipple line…not ribs, belly or thighs) touches the ground and your fully extend your elbows at the top counts as one. If one of those two things doesn’t happen, you’re at zero. Clear as a bell, I know!
So, with pull ups, we have a set of standards and in order to safely get you TO those standards, and because of the complexity of the shoulder joint, the riskiest one in your age demographic, we are going to abide by the following:
- You will have an RX or close to Rx Ring row before we begin vertical pulling. What’s RX? Feet on a 12″ box and rings low enough your body is parallel to the ground when you pull. You should be able to do 2 or 3 of those to show us your rhomboids, biceps and the other pulling muscles have the strength to hold your body weight.
- What if you don’t have that? then you should be lowering the rings and stepping forward to get stronger on this movements before you progress.
- You will have full shoulder range of motion….in other words in your press, you can fully extend the shoulder to 180 degrees without leaning backward, elbows fully extended, AND you feel comfortable “pulling back” a bit in that position. If not, that’s an important position to work on before pulling vertically.
- IF you have the above, then we can start hanging and pulling. Vertical pullers will work together on the flag wall with a coach so that you’re all getting the same information at the same time.
- **Otherwise we’ll mix up harder ring rows, jumping pull ups toward the Rx (bar 6″ above the top of your head), and maybe some negatives from a low mobile bar with your feet on the ground.
AFTER all that – which is only about 10 mins of work, you’ll tackle a 21-15-9 of heavy KB DL’s and Pushups – we love this combination. Have fun with it!
Congrats on completing strength day – one of the more important days of your week.