Weighted Pull ups for Powerlifting: Improve your Total

Are you a powerlifter looking to build your total? Did you know that weighted pull ups can be used to help build your powerlifting total?

Weighted Pull ups for Powerlifting

If you are a power lifter or just interested in getting bone-crushingly strong and jacked, you should be doing weighted pull ups in your program. Getting stronger at weighted pull ups will transfer over to your other main lifts and will help you feel stronger and more stable in your other exercises.

Most power lifters love to fill their program with heavy, hard compound exercises like the squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press. Other heavy compound exercises like the bent over barbell row, weighted plank, and weighted pull up can help round out the perfect program.

If you think pull ups and other body weight exercises are just too easy for you, rest assured. Pull ups can become bone crushingly hard as long as you are adding weight and progressively overloading your pull ups just like your other exercises.

And if you can’t do pull ups and think being in a heavyweight class is a handy excuse for not being able to pull your chin above the bar in your pull ups, listen up. Trading in some fat for muscle and improving your strength to bodyweight ratio so you can do weighted pull ups–even at a heavy weight class–will help you improve your relative strength and probably your Wilks Score too.

The benefits of this exercise are just too numerous to forego them in your program. After implementing the weighted pull up in your program for 6-12 weeks, you will definitely notice the difference in your overall strength and ability to stabilize big weights.

Compound, Closed Kinetic Chain Exercise are Great for Strength

The weighted pull up is a compound, closed kinetic chain exercise.

Compound = trains multiple muscle groups at one time. Compound exercises are better for training economy, enhancing neuromuscular stability and athletic performance, and injury prevention. They also build more muscle and enhance connective tissue and bone strength more than isolation exercises. As a powerlifter, you are already doing a lot of compound exercises in your training program, but these are all good reasons to employ the weighted pull up in your powerlifting program–to build your back but also to help you build strong biceps!

Improve your Wilks Score

Powerlifting is all about relative strength, or being the strongest lifter and lifting the most weight relative to your bodyweight.

Lifters know this, and they are always looking to achieve bodyweight benchmarks like a 1.5x bodyweight bench press, 2.5x bodyweight squat, or 3x bodyweight deadlift.

Build Stronger Biceps

Weighted pull ups help powerlifters build strong bicep muscles and bicep tendons that are capable of taking a lot of force during a heavy mixed grip deadlift without injury.

Your heavy compound pulling exercises–the deadlift, bent over row and the weighted pull up are your best choices for bicep development. Only after you make sure you are putting a good amount of your training volume towards these exercises should you worry about isolation exercises for the biceps like the simple bicep curl, drag curl, or EZ Bar Curl.

If you are not a bodybuilder, or are not concerned with building the biggest biceps around, you shouldn’t even need to worry about performing isolation exercises for the biceps. Weighted pull ups (and your other heavy compounds) will provide more than enough training volume for your biceps to make them big and strong enough for the other compound lifts.

Build a Better Grip

When you do pull ups and weighted pull ups, you have to hang onto a bar for up to a minute at a time. When performed for multiple sets, you will accumulate multiple minutes in the hanging position. This is a serious challenge and training effect for your forearm muscles and grip with bodyweight pull ups, and even more of a challenge when you start adding weight to your pull up sets. When performed over a couple mesocycles, weighted pull ups can really help you build your grip strength so you can hold onto those really heavy deadlifts, and just grip the bar harder in general.

Weighted Pull ups for Powerlifting

Strengthen your grip for those heavy deadlifts!

Build Stronger Lats

Stronger lats are a key benefit of performing the weighted pull up exercise. Your lats play a big role in helping you to stabilize during your three main lifts. They help you to stabilize your shoulders during the bench press exercise, and they help you to stabilize your spine and your shoulders during the deadlift and your spine during the back squat.

Remember that the lats insert all the way into your tailbone. They help you to control and protect your lower lumbar spine and lumbosacral juncture by helping you to maintain good positioning through your entire back.

The lats are a key muscle for maintaining a healthy back and lat exercises are often prescribed for patients with lower back pain to help them regain function and co-activation of some of the smaller spinal stabilizer muscles. Having strong lats–accomplished through the weighted pull up exercise, can help you keep you back a bit healthier and give you more longevity in your power lifting career.

Pull ups Promote Spinal Decompression

As long as the trainee maintains good alignment, the pull up is a great spinal decompression exercise.

The weighted pull up in particular is a terrific way for power lifters to incorporate some spinal decompression into their routines. Power lifters handle multiple tons in each workout and the main lifts involve a lot of spinal compression. This is not necessarily harmful, but adding some more spinal decompression work into the routine can help a power lifter stay a little more resilient and provide a chance for nutrient delivery into the discs and some much needed spinal decompression.

You can even put pull ups between your spinal compression exercises to help balance the amount of spinal compression and decompression in your routine.

To read a little bit more about the spinal decompression benefits of pull ups, read Pull ups for Lower Back Pain.

Pull ups for Progressive Overload

Power lifters know that to get stronger and improve their totals, they have to incorporate progressive overload into their squat, bench press, and deadlift training. This can mean adding weight, adding sets, adding reps, adding time under tension, or adding training days in the week. In some way, shape or form, they must add volume to their main lifts in order to progress.

Accessory movements like the pull up and the weighted pull up are no different. The trainee concerned with maximal strength must add volume and/or tension overload in order to get stronger at weighted pull ups and have that strength transfer into a stronger squat, bench press, or deadlift.

In this article I am going to provide you with a simple progressive-overload program for the weighted pull up.

Can’t do a weighted pull up yet or even a regular pull up? No worries. I’ve got you covered. I’m going to give you a progressive program that has three phases. Simply upgrade to the next phase when you are ready. Like my other programs, this program can be easily added to a steady routine of squats, bench press or deadlifts without compromising your recovery–it will only make you stronger.

Pull up Training Program

Here is a full weighted pull up program to add to your three main lifts and other accessory work. If you are already doing pull ups or lat pulldowns, cut those out of your program and do the full program listed below.

Once you can complete your current phase easily, advance to the next phase.

All exercises are listed as sets x reps. Feel free to rest as much as you need between sets (between 1-3 minutes depending on your fitness level, work capacity, training experience and gender).

Phase 1 :

(Start with this Phase if you are a Powerlifter who Cannot Yet Do a Full Pull up)

Week 1:

Tuesday: Band Assisted Pull up 3 x 8 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 3 x 6 reps

Week 2:

Tuesday: Band Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 3 x 6 reps

Week 3:

Tuesday: Band Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 5 x 6 reps

Week 4:

Tuesday: Band Assisted Pull up 5 x 8 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 5 x 6 reps

Week 5-8:

Start over at week 1, decreasing the amount of band/machine assistance you use by 10-20 percent

**Repeat Phase 1 until you can do at least 5-8 pull ups without any assistance

Phase 2:

Start with this Phase When you can do between 5-8 Pull ups in a given Set

Week 1:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 3 x 3

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 2:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 4 x 3 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 3:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 5 x 3 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 4:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 6 x 3 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 5:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 3 x 4 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull ups 4 x 8 reps (Decrease Assistance this week)

Week 6:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 4 x 4 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 7:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 5 x 4 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up 4 x 8 reps

Week 8:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 6 x 4 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull ups 4 x 8 reps

Week 9:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 3 x 5 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull ups 3 x 10 (decrease the assistance this week)

Week 10:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 4 x 5 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull ups 3 x 10

Week 11:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 5 x 5 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull ups 3 x 10

Week 12:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 6 x 5 reps

Friday: Machine Assisted Pull up

Phase 3:

You should be able to do 6-12 pull ups in one consecutive set to complete this stage.

Week 1:

Tuesday: Full Pull up 3 x 6

Friday: Weighted Pull up 3 x 3

Week 2: