Pull Ups: How To Stop Relying On Bands
Band-assisted pull ups are without a doubt, the best beginner pull up progression. I will die on that hill.
I mean we can’t do a pull up and yet with the band, we can rep them out for fun, making sure we hit the right muscles.
But therein lies the problem, right?
What if we can do loads of pull ups with the assistance of the bands, but when it comes to taking the band away, we’re left hanging
Let’s chat through why you’re still so reliant on using bands in your pull ups, even if you have weaned yourself down to the lightest band you have. Because when teaching pull ups, I see the same banded pull up form mistakes, and so let’s make sure these mistakes aren’t you.
Mistake #1: Not Pausing on each rep
You might be wondering: changing the tempo on an exercise that we already struggle to do, isn’t that too challenging for beginners?
Short answer: no.. But let me land.
The reason for this is that we need to interrupt the stretch shortening cycle… … …
Glad you asked!
Oversimplified when we stretch a muscle quickly, we activate the spindles in our muscle cells that subsequently tell our muscles to contract. Hard.
Because of this, it means in reps where muscle length rapidly changes, we can produce more force than we would had we otherwise been doing the exercise without engaging the stretch shortening cycle.
Now, why is this important for our band-assisted reps, i hear you ask?
Well with a band, the elastic-like reflex of the stretch shortening cycle becomes far more pronounced, because the band itself is elastic.
If we’re not careful we can literally end up bouncing on the band, which isn’t only bad because we’re not getting sufficient time under tension in that stretched phase - so literally cheating ourselves out of muscle building opportunities, but it is also likely to lead to swinging between reps,
And thirdly, pulling out of the bottom of the pull up - the very first thing we do to initiate a single rep - is the second hardest part of the pull up - the hardest being getting that chin over the bar.
When we add a short pause - and I mean short - one second will do, we don’t need to be watching lord of the rings here - we train ourselves to be more familiar with the challenge of pulling out of a deadhang.
Mistake #2: Not Hitting full range of motion
If the bottom of you banded pull ups look like this then this angle between the arms and the torso is a big problem
It tells me that we’re not training that lower part of the pull up rep that we mentioned earlier, but more so than this, we would struggle to replicate this pattern without the band.
If I took the band away and asked you to replicate the arm angle we saw earlier on each rep, this is really hard and simply not how we would perform our pull ups without a band supporting us so it is no wonder why we struggle when the assistance is removed!
Our head should finish each pull up rep under the bar if we are going to replicate the pull up proper
Cali Crowd, use these tips to make sure your banded reps are actually assisting you, not holding you back and wasting your time.
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