hey what is going on everybody today i'm gonna be showing you five things that are gonna be taking you from being this guy to being this guy this is the guy you want to be right here so let's get into it alrighty so after many requests i'm going to be focusing on the beginner zero to five and a little bit beyond pull-up range so that's what this video is for and we're gonna get right into it so before we even touch the bar thing number one is going to be grip strength i have trained thousands of marines thousands of civilians on how to do more pull-ups all the way from zero to like 50 pull-ups in one set the number one thing especially for females so listen up the number one thing that is lacking right off the bat is normally grip strength so i'm going to show you a couple of exercises things you can do to train your grip strength but i want you to focus on that first and the last one is going to involve the bar but the first two are not so yeah i'm going to show you those exercises really quick all right so the first grip strength exercise we're going to keep it really simple is going to be farmer's walks you're going to grab two heavy objects squeeze them tight with your hands and walk back and forth that's all there is to it you can go till failure until you drop them they slip out of your hands or you put them down but make sure your straining as much as you can holding on to these as long as you can the reason that farmer's walks are so good is because as i'm walking it's better than just standing here like this as i'm walking the weight is shifting and i'm using my whole core and my body to stabilize as i'm walking back and forth and so that little shift in weight from one leg to the other is actually making you over grip on one side and it's kind of like a rest relaxed phase and you just try to keep those as stable as possible so yeah the first exercise to strengthen your grip strength is farmer's walks you just walk with heavy weights until failure all right so the next exercise i want you to do is called a pinch plate hold i have two 25 pound plates here and all i'm doing is pinching them as hard as i can and standing stationary you can turn this into a farmer's walk and walk back and forth but since it's a harder style of grip and you don't want them like flopping around because you're pinching very hard with your thumb that's what we're really trying to incorporate here your thumb and it's just more of a crushing pinch strength and it's helping work out all those flexors in your forearms so yeah this is a pinch plate hold you're just squeezing these plates as hard as you can for as long as you can alright and the last exercise we will be doing for grip strength is going to be dead hangs so for this we will be using the pull-up bar all you're going to be doing is grabbing onto the pull-up bar just like you're about to do a pull-up let your body hang and this is a inactive dead hang so my body is completely open i'm not flexed into it you can flex into it a little bit if you want but a completely open dead hang that way we're resting all of our strength in our hands you can put thumb underneath the bar thumb over the bar whatever you want to do for the dead hang where you're hanging here until failure keep your body as rigid as possible you can bend your knees if you're too tall you're going to touch the ground i don't recommend crossing your legs but hang here as long as you can and that is a dead hang that is the last exercise for grip strength all right so just like i said in the beginning we're going to start working our way back down our arm the next spot we're going to focus on is elbow flexion this curling motion what pulls our body inwards or upwards on the pull-up bar all right so it does help to know how the anatomy of elbow flexion is happening which is this right here obviously you can see my bicep is one of the the muscles that's helping that happen but there's two other muscles that i want to focus on as well and that's going to be your brachialis and your brachioradialis those are two muscles that are really dominant when it comes to that pulling motion and getting the pull-up down all right so the first exercise i'm going to show you is the bicep curl just a standard barbell curl and so i have an empty barbell here about 45 pounds and i'm just trying to isolate that bicep as much as possible and one thing i'm trying to do is keep my hands rotated inwards almost like i'm doing a chin up that way i'm focusing more on my bicep than my brachioradialis and my radios like i discussed earlier we're just trying to focus on the bicep here nice clean reps no swaying and that helps fire those biceps up all right so this next exercise is going to be helping you target the brachialis and the brachioradialis a little bit better it also incorporates your grip strength like we did in step one as well it's one of my favorite exercises and i do these all the time it's going to be a plate pull so i have a 25 pound plate and all i'm going to be doing is getting a nice solid stance here flexing my back make sure i'm pulling in and right now right here in this elbow socket you feel all the way down your brachioradialis and the internal workings of your brachialis as well and that isolates that pulling muscle very well you can feel them way more than you can feel your bicep working in this position [Music] so it works really nicely plus you get a nice grip strength workout as well all right so number three is going to be isometric contractions an isometric contraction is when your muscle is contracted and under resistance but not lengthening or shortening so if i flex my arm in this position and i push down on my palm here my bicep and my other forearm muscles are all preventing that resistance from pushing my arm downwards i'm holding in place i'm not lengthening or shortening that is an isometric contraction they work wonders for spot checking your weaknesses training areas that are kind of hard to reach when doing full range of motion and they're just great for pull-up strength alright so the way you work isometric contractions on the pull-up bar is you get yourself an object that you can stand on that when you stand on it and grab the pull-up bar your arms are slightly bent and what you're going to do is you're going to hold that position and step off the object and stop yourself from descending so you're going to hold yourself in that position as long as you can the reason isometric contractions are so good for pull-ups is it allows us to train our weak areas and really focus on those areas and strengthen them for example on average everybody struggles from 90 degrees and above so that mid-range pull-up and then getting your chin above the bar what an isometric contraction allows you to do is it allows you to train that area specifically without fatiguing by doing full range of motion or it allows you to train your weak areas even if you can't do a pull-up because normally people can hold themselves in a certain position or above the bar but they can't do a full pull-up yet so it allows you to take certain weaknesses out of the pull-up and then eventually put it all together and do a pull-up so a couple of examples of those is when i'm on the bar i'm going to hold it 90 degrees and i'm going to hold in the middle between all the way up and 90 degrees and i'm going to hold all the way up an isometric contraction has been shown to strengthen five degrees above the position you're in and five degrees below the position you're in so you do get a little bit of range of motion from training the isometric contraction but it's really for spot checking but it's extremely good for developing your weak areas all right so number four is going to be negatives and if you don't know what a negative is it's where you step on an object that allows you to get your chin above the bar taking up all the weight switching above the bar and then you step off that object and lower down as consistently and slowly as possible and before you touch the ground you can hop back up on the object all you're trying to do is take out the concentric phase or the pull-up portion and work on the eccentric phase which is the lowering down a lot of people are stronger in the eccentric phase of anything so involving in a pull-up is you're able to do the eccentric phase more than you're able to do the concentric phase so even if you can't do a pull up yet this is a great way to train the full dynamic range of a pull-up without having to pull yourself up because you're still working the same muscle groups the same stabilizers and it's such a great workout lowering yourself down at a consistent rate even if you can't do a single pull-up so negatives is number four again it's just stepping off an object getting your chin above the bar and then lowering down as consistent as possible i do about a seven second count every time alrighty and lastly number five is going to be developing the neurological and the confidence building portion which is just getting your body comfortable with the pulling up portion or the concentric portion of the pull-up and just getting used to what it feels like to pull your body weight up to the point where your chin is above the bar and what we're going to be doing for that is obviously if you can't do a pull-up yet you'll need some sort of assistance and what we can do is these are really cheap they're dense resistance bands to take off a lot of your weight and they just make you able to pull your body weight up so you know how it feels and all we're going to do is hang this over the bar and i like to put one foot through it so we'll hang it over the bar i need a little bit of agility to get up here but yeah one foot through there and you're gonna put all of your body weight on that one foot you can kind of cross your legs here it's the only time i'll allow you to cross your legs when doing pull-ups and then you're gonna pull up get your chin above the bar back down just like you're doing pull-ups and what that's going to do as long as you keep it slow and controlled and you don't use the acceleration of the rubber band to get you over the bar you just kind of ride the resistance up as long as you do that you'll actually get a nice muscle workout as well but mainly what we're trying to do here is make your body comfortable with the pulling up portion and that way you know how it feels to do a pull-up and as you train your grip strength and those isometric contractions and everything else we talked about it'll allow you to put it all together and do a pull-up that way you know what it feels like and you develop the strength and hopefully you're doing pull-ups by the end of this video alrighty just to summarize all we've been through real quick we got number one focus on your grip strength do those exercises number two focus on that elbow flexion and breaking those three muscles into separate groups and training those individually as best you can number three work on those isometric contractions focus on your weak spots number four do those negatives go to failure try to keep it as consistent as possible maybe even pause the top before you lower down and then lastly make sure you're building that confidence even doing jumping pull-ups and getting up at the top that way you know how it feels to pull your body up if you don't have a band and that pretty much does it put this all together in a nice little package and do the best you can to go to a failure and you'll be doing pull-ups in no time i promise you these are the best tips i could come up with to teach you all how to do from zero to five pull-ups and i hope you all like this video i'm staff sergeant eckert if you like this channel please like and subscribe but until then i'll see you at the next video