garage gym: Pull-Ups

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Pull-Ups

"The goal is keep the goal the goal" Dan John

Pull-ups are perhaps the most obvious and over rated supplemental exercise for rock climbers. Everyone knows that the number of pull-ups you can do has nothing to do with how well you climb. So why waste precious training time doing pull-ups in your garage? As a dedicated athlete you should always be questioning the results of your training. While it important to try new ideas, it’s also easy to get side tracked in to the latest fitness trends. Ask yourself “are doing a lot of pull-ups helping me achieve my athletic and climbing goals?”

Pull-ups train primarily the latissimus dorsi and teres major of the upper back. When executed properly the shoulder blades are brought together at the top of the movement and also train the rhomboid and the middle and lower trapezius. These are the major pulling muscles of the body. But simply “pulling down” is not specific enough to improve your climbing. Since the father of hard bouldering John Gill first started training with fingertip pull-ups in the fifties, climbers, perhaps out of boredom, have been modifying the pull-up to make them more sport specific. They range from the genius to the ridiculous.

Fingerboards, rock-rings and the elbow destroying Bachar ladder have also helped climbers mold the pull-up into a more sports specific exercise. But it wasn’t until the uber-strong German Wolfgang Gullich further mutated the pull-up when he developed “campus training” that real progress was made. No serious hard free climber should ignore the benefits of campus training. Finally, the pull-up fully evolved when Eric Horst unveiled his “hyper gravity isolation training” or H.I.T. in the mid-90’s. This is the most sport specific “pull-up” yet. In addition to working the pulling muscles of the upper back, H.I.T also focuses on isolated finger and grip strength as well as climbing movement. You can checkout all these methods in Eric’s excellent book "Training For Climbing"

Steve Bechtel of climbstrong.com recommends doing pull-ups in a more horizontal plane, also called the inverted row. He also recommends locking off or holding the body up at the top of the movement with one arm. Excellent. At garage gym we sometime do “Burpee pull-ups”. This exercise combines two great exercises into an anaerobic dogfight. You can also combine Burpee pull-ups with the barbell push press, also known as "Jonestown sprint", for a more challenging fight. Make sure you time yourself so you can try and beat it next time!

I remember reading in Wolfgang’s book that he once lost a pull up compatiton on a German talk show because he insisted on using perfect form. So should you. According to Gym Jones a quality pull-up “requires the elbows to pass behind the midline of the body, if this happens the entire head raises above the bar, and keep an active shoulder position at the bottom as opposed to a dead hang”. Don’t injure or embarrass yourself at 24 hour fitness straining to get your chin over the bar for one more rep.

Pull-ups are the king of upper body exercises, much like the front squat for the lower body. Pull-ups for climbers are best utilized during a foundation-building phase or for training work capacity (more on this later). As a method for improving maximum strength for rock climbing, pull-ups are a bit limited. I would recommend inverted rows and lock-offs, H.I.T. laps and campus training as a more enlighten program to improve your climbing performance. Remember, the goal is to keep the goal the goal.

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Introduction

garage gym

I’ve always been a gym rat. I like to workout. In particular I’ve always been interested in strength and conditioning as a means to improve climbing performance. Bachar ladders, home made fingerboards, pull up bars, and crack machines have over the years littered my garages and lawns. In my thirty years of climbing I have almost always had access to a commercial gym. I have also accumulated a small library of books and articles on fitness and climbing performance. These include a dog-eared, twenty-year-old copy of Bill Pearl’s Strength Training, to my recently purchased copy of Eric Horst’s Maximum Climbing. After an extended lay off due to illness and pursuing other interests, in the fall of 2009 I began to train again.

After a few workouts at a local gym I began to question if it (a machine based circuit) was actually helping me. I was going through the motions. It was boring as hell. A few days later I stumbled upon an article in Outside magazine on GYM JONES the Salt Lake City based gym owned by famed alpinist Mark Twight. Since I’ve always admired Twight’s climbing, writing, and taste in music, I quickly drank the kool aid. The Gym Jones web site was a revelation. A short time later I discovered Mountain Athlete.com, Climbstrong.com and Cross fit. I soon realized that I had been wasting my time, and perhaps I had never really trained with any meaningful level of intensity. In Twight’s book Kiss or Kill Confessions of a Serial Climber he says, “…know the difference between working out and training”.

Since family, career, and other interests take up a lot of my time, I decided I needed the ability to train at home. Fortunately I have a large garage. I started with a pull up bar, fingerboard and a few dumbbells. Later I added kettlebells, a medicine ball, gymnast rings, a small climbing wall, and an Air dyne bike. The information age made it easy for me to find the books, websites, and videos by Paval Tsatouline, Dan John, Neil Gresham and others. Yet none of these training philosophies addressed the specific needs of my friends and myself, i.e. forty-something’s who climb Yosemite’s long hard free climbs and big walls in a day. High Sierra car-to-car, dawn-to-dark missions that combine ultra running/hiking with multi-pitch rock climbs and high ridge traverses (my personal favorite). We also skate ski, backcountry ski, as well as ride mountain and road bikes. Our training combines all these influences into a potent brew. The process is always evolving. We’ll try anything. Then we’ll evaluate it, modify it, keep it, or chuck it. Then try something else. The results speak for themselves.

Mike Davis RN

Truckee, California

Spring 2010