I Can't Do a Pull-Up

Bigger Stronger Leaner
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… and, if I’m honest, it’s really pissing me off that I can’t do one.

I consider myself a strong guy: upper body, core, lower body. I’m tall and lean. My gym workouts are nothing to scoff at, and I hit the weights hard.

So why is a pull-up seemingly impossible for me?

One forum I read said that you have to be able to hang from the bar for two minutes before you can do pull-ups. Since my hang is currently stuck at one minute max, should I just say “To hell with it” and give up?

Nope. I’m not stopping till I can do pull-ups.

I’m determined enough (desperate enough?) that I’d probably pay $ for an in-person coach to help me do it. Really, not sure I can go to my gym much longer and watch the other guys leap through the air, grab that bar, and do one pull up after another while I still can’t do even ONE.

Help.

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How tall are you and how much do you weigh?

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6’1" and 180 pounds.

I know pull-ups aren’t just about “strength” – maybe my grip is what’s holding me back?

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Being tall-ish doesn’t help especially if you have long arms.

Can you do even one negative pull-up?

I couldn’t do many a couple years ago. My recent best is 12. I’m 6’3” and 215-220. I didn’t even bother working on pull-ups until I got a reasonable amount of strength on squats and deadlifts.

Once I was there for total body strength, I did negatives and did them low-ish total reps, multiple times per week. Then I just started doing pull-ups multiple times per week and tried to do more total reps each workout. It’s just a progression that takes time like anything else.

The first pull is retracting your scapulas and then pulling with your arms. The range of motion is not much with your scapulas but is important to properly pull and actually work you back and not just your arms. This is the first progression I did before doing full pull-ups.

High rep pull-ups crush my nervous system for some reason so I rarely do a set of more than 3-5 and just add weight. If I do more than 8 in a set, I can barely do 3-4 next set.

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I couldnt do any most of my life also. Im 6’2, around 250lbs, been into Muay Thai and MMA most of my life, i am also an instructor now and i also have clients in the gym.
When i worked really hard for this, i could do like 10-12 pullups with neutral grip, some 8 palms facing me, and some 2-3 with palms facing away. Now i probably cant do any again cuz i just dont do it. Why? Well, because when i busted my ass to be able to do it, and i managed to - nothing actually changed in my life. Imagine that? No one ever asked me to show off my pullups to pay me money for it or to suck my dick for it.
No one gave a shit… And i started wondering - why do i? Do i enjoy that exercise? No, its kinda hard on my elbows. Did i get some amazing hypertrophy benefits? Nope. Did anything, besides achy elbows and extra gym time to train pullups, change in my life? No. So i stopped doing them.
Its kinda similar with rows. I never really feel them as a good hypertrophy exercise, they make my lower back tired, which sucks when i do squats and deads(which i love), but nothing else really changes.
So nowdays i view exercises either by - do i feel them in the right muscles, and/or - do i like doing em.
If i dont enjoy the exercise, like i enjoy deadlifting, and if it doesnt make my muscles pumped and burn, like dips do, i just dont do because - why should i?

Most of these strength and fitness standards suck ass. Pullups, pushups, crunches, running, whatnot. Unless its necessary for a job, or unless they actually do something for your goal - fuck em. Whats funny is that even professions where they are necessary for a job, dont actually need you to do them on a job.
I have trained military as an MMA coach, and it always made me smile on the inside, how these guys can do pullups, but cant throw a punch worth a shit. I mean, which is closer to what they do? Close combat or pullups? Where the fuck do you pull up on a bar in combat?
I actually saw russian military having to do front flips. Why the fuck? Dont see Russians front-flipping away from missiles in Ukraine, dont we, haha.

Kinda like fighters being obsessed with jump rope. If you can jump good for 3 mins, you are done with it. The same fighter who can jump for 10mins, will not become any better at fighting if he will be able to jump for 30mins. Nothing in his actual fighting abilities will change.
That is junk training.
Doing pullups just to do pullups is junk training. You can do what i do, and fry all the back muscles with 2-3 band exercises, lol.

Now if you enjoy it and thats your goal - cool.
Keep in mind tho, that if its so hard for you, same like me, its not like you will ever be good at it. You will bust your ass and pay a coach to do 1… then 3… maybe 5. The guys doing em right now will bust out 10+ while you will grind through the 4th one.
If its so hard now, nothing you will do, will make you breeze through em like a professional climber or smth.
So if your goal is to do 3 - cool, carry on. But if your goal is to be good at em, we already know its never gonna happen. Its kinda like that in everything. Best bodybuilders looked like bodybuilders before they even knew what they are doing in the gym. Those who look like shit can do all the bodybuilding training and diet and steroids, they will look better but never like THAT anyways.

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If you want to do a pull-up, then I’d suggest using bands and slowly decreasing the resistance. I’ve seen guys doing just 3-4 with a strong band and then move through the lighters ones, eventually to pounding them out with no aid. Negatives are great too as already mentioned, but I think it’s important to feel out the concentric also.

As @hankthetank89 implies, no exercise is mandatory. I know we can have little goals we set ourselves though.

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The two things I would suggest were already mentioned!

Maybe do slow negatives on Monday and band-assisted on Thursday. Everything is going to basically be a failure set for you at this point, so I wouldn’t work it more frequently than that.

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I have a whole new perspective now on the why of exercise selection. Thanks for the laugh.

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Sorry I just gotta.
I’m 6’2” and have ALWAYS had trouble with pull-ups, except in the military when I weighed 185ish.
Long arms are IMO the limiting factor because they increase length of travel for the movement. Shorter height shorter movement = less force needed to be used.
I’ve not looked into it, yet, but there’s got to be an explanation in the world of physics. Could even be in a reply I didn’t read.
If you really really want to do them I recommend getting as lean as you can and keep trying and trying. You only fail when you give up on yourself - everyone else is secondary in that :slight_smile:
Best of luck bro!

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It’s all about physics.

Moment: force x arm length

Work: force x distance travelled

i.e. it’s a lot harder for a tall, fat person to do a pull-up than a short, skinny person.

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Love your whole reply (not just this excerpt). Your achy elbows got me to thinking: Why risk an injury that could keep me from doing all the exercises I DO enjoy?

I’m also a pianist, and don’t want to take a chance on anything happening that fucks up my hands and wrists. (Ironically, I thought my strong fingers would help with the pull-ups … Nope.)

I may dabble with trying some pull-ups again this week … but now it’s no longer an obsession.

Thanks!

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I tend to believe there is an associated aptitude to doing pullups that corresponds to the aptitude to be good at gymnastics. If that has some validity, you would need to access that aptitude before you gained excessive fat weight (and muscle weight not beneficial to doing pullups).

Being 6’0" tall, my attempts to enjoy gymnastics was reasonably satisfactory. I wasn’t going to be really good, but I could still enjoy the sport. I tried to learn a number of gymnastic tricks, and did dips and pullups as part of the training. Before I lifted a single weight I was 160lbs and 19 years old and could do 20 parallel bar dips and 20 pullups. I just stopped at 20. [as a 7th grader I could do 6 pullups the first time I tried to do one.] I don’t know if I am an outlier, or that anyone who devoted the effort before obtaining extra weight could do likewise. (This is before my college had a gymnastics team - that I could never have been good enough to be on, if they had one.)

I did not use pullups as part of my training once I got over 200lbs. It hurt my elbows to do pullups. So to Hank’s point, how necessary is it? I would not say it had much to do with my development once I got fairly successful at competing in bodybuilding.

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Use the assisted pullup machine at half your bodyweight?
Number of reps is less important than proper form.

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What approaches you been trying so far?

I second negatives. I could barely hang on a bar when I first tried doing pull-ups and still managed to work up to doing 3-4 very difficult ones just by doing negatives and then slow descents until I managed to control the movement reasonably well.

I never tried using a band.

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You’ve gotten some good advice here, but I’ll throw my experience in the mix.

When I weighed ~230 (5’11"), I decided I wanted to do pull-ups/chins, having never really been able to do them since I was a kid. Couldn’t do one. Started with doing negatives. Basically just spammed volume—I honestly didn’t care about form so much, just trying to get my body used to lowering my weight. After a week or two I started trying pull-ups, usually allowing myself a generous jump to start and just hammering singles any time I walked by a bar (or usually monkey bars on a run). I did assisted chins on occasion but mostly would just use a lot of “leg drive” and body english to get the volume in—like, say, ~30 “pull-ups” or negatives 4x/week.

… And after about a month I could actually do a pull-up proper. Kept at it—I’d do as many good ones as possible, then carry on with cheaty ones.

After another month, I could regularly hit 3 sets of 5, and another month later or so, I was doing 4 sets of 10–12 whenever.

Cut to earlier this year, bodyweight upward of 290, realized I couldn’t do them any more. Decided that, in addition to losing weight, I could just try the same method. After a few weeks of consistent effort, I’m up to 5 solid reps of proper form for about 3 sets 4x/week, as well as ~40 total chins/pull-ups per lifting session done in mostly singles.

This is a lot of words to say that spamming volume, even with poor form, really worked for me, even at a significantly higher weight than you. You got this dude—if you want to pursue it.

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