Why are Pull ups Difficult?

Why are pull ups so difficult?

Lug your Bodyweight

Well, pull ups are difficult for many reasons. First off, you need to heave most of your body weight over a bar with your upper body musculature.

Vertical Hanging

Second, you have to do it while hanging off a bar–which is not an easy feat in and of itself.

Most people have poor grip strength and hanging off of a bar for any more than 3 seconds is hard.

For those without a gymnastics background, this is a drawback in and of itself.

Obesity

For most people in the United States and other countries with a high rate of obesity, pulling ones body weight over a bar is an insurmountable challenge.

This alone means that for more than 40 percent of the U.S adult population which is clinically obese, pull ups remain almost impossible.

Gender

For women, pull ups are extra difficult because women have smaller upper bodies and shoulder girdles, and fewer androgen receptors in their upper bodies.

While women are usually weaker than men, the lower body strength of women more closely matches the lower body strength of men.

Generally speaking, untrained females have much, much weaker upper bodies than men.

And women carry more of their weight and body fat in their lower bodies, making lugging their weight over a bar even more difficult.

(Women do especially poor in the military pull up tests, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here is a military pull up program.)

Social Surroundings

Despite what my Instagram Feed reveals to me, most Americans are overweight, out of shape and don’t weight train.

Even among those who do frequent a gym, the effort level among regular gym goers is really low.

Enter any typical commercial gym and a similar pattern emerges.

One or two individuals out of every 20 or more are training hard, exerting effort, and following some sort of reasonable program design.

The others are running their mouth, doing cardio only or checking out members of the opposite sex.

Mental Blocks

And finally, the remaining people may have a mental block around doing pull ups.

They have been told that they are soooo hard, most of the people they see in real life are obese and completely de-conditioned, and the remaining gym goers they see have poor work ethic.

It’s hard to do significantly better when you have very few strength role models in the real world.

Pull ups take hard frickin work for a substantial period of time. Most people will have to strength train three to six times per week. They will have to keep their nutrition and weight/body fat in check and sleep enough. They will also need to seek out a training environment where they are exposed to people actually doing pull ups.