Pullup Progression

It may take quite a long time to work through the progression of pullup negatives from Part 2, so don’t be alarmed if you’re nowhere close to being done with negatives. But if you were already knocking on the door of your first pullup, or maybe you started being able to do some pullups but not as many as are listed in your workout, this next stage is for you.

Once you reach the final stages of the negative progression, there’s a good chance you can get a pullup or two. At this point, you want to begin each A2 exercise with as many pullups (or chinups, or neutral-grip chinups) as you can, and then round out your working set with negatives. Of course, beginning a set with one or two or however many conventional pullups will leave your muscles exhausted, so you won’t be able to achieve the same number of negatives as you were when only performing negatives. Plan to take a step or two backward on the pullup progression list as you slot conventional pullups in at the beginning of each set.

Once you get to the point where you can get four quality pullups, the supplemental negatives become less important – more like bonus content. You can treat each A2 exercise as a series of max effort (quality) pullups/chinups/neutral-grip chinups. Get as many as you can with each set, up to the upper range indicated by your workout.

One helpful method you can use around this stage of the progression is to round out your set of pullups with lat pulldowns. If your A2 exercise calls for four sets of 8-10 chinups, you might start with 4 chinups and then immediately perform 6 reps of lat pulldown (matching hand position) to get to the desired 10 repetitions. This is an excellent method to employ when there’s a reasonably large delta between your maximum possible pullups and the number called for with your A2 exercise.

Everybody will go through this pullup progression at different rates. Continuing to use negatives or the assisted pullup machine is perfectly okay. These progression resources are always accessible in your app’s ‘guides’ section so you can revisit them when the time is right.