One honest test of strength
Ten clean pull ups. Most men can't do three.
How much you move on a machine is irrelevant. Hang off a bar and there's nowhere to hide.
There's a difference between looking strong and being strong, and the pull up is where that difference shows up.
You can load a leg press with most of the gym and still not be able to lift your own body off the floor. That's not strength, it's equipment. The bar doesn't care how your chest looks in a shirt.
Most men judge themselves on what they can push. The better measure is whether you can move yourself, and how easily. That's your strength to weight ratio, and it's the one number that actually tracks with being capable in a real body.
Why I couldn't just let it go
- It's the clearest test of strength there's, and it's honest
- It improves from both ends: get stronger, or get lighter
- It needs almost no equipment and no gym membership
- Ten clean reps isn't elite. It's capable, and it's holdable into your fifties
The reason most men never get there's not effort. It's that they train pull ups the way they train everything else: occasionally, to failure, with no plan for the gap between two reps and ten.
This course is the plan for that gap. It handles both halves of the equation, the strength going up and the bodyweight coming down, because trying to add reps while carrying excess fat is the slowest possible route.
Here's some of what you'll learn
- Why strength to weight ratio is the measure that matters
- The fastest honest route from zero or two reps to five
- The phase two plan that takes you from five to ten
- How much fat loss is worth more than any amount of extra pulling
- How to keep your strength while you lose the weight
- How often to train pull ups, and why more is usually worse
- The accessory work that genuinely helps, and the work that doesn't
- Training for command of the movement rather than for soreness
This is what you're getting
- 30 lessons across 7 sections, read in your browser, yours for good
- The phase one programme, from where you're now to five clean reps
- The phase two programme, five to ten
- The nutrition side: calories, protein and keeping strength while losing fat
- Recovery and frequency, so you stop sabotaging the next session
- 30 lessons across 7 sections
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Why not just do more pull ups
Because pull ups punish that harder than almost any other lift. They're a near maximal effort for most men, every single rep, and the fastest way to stall is to grind them every time you walk past a bar.
The other half nobody mentions: every pound you're carrying is a pound you've to pull. Two men with identical backs will have wildly different rep counts if one is two stone heavier.
Being straight with you. If you can already do ten clean pull ups, this isn't for you. It's written for men somewhere between zero and about six.
The part that's not in a programme
The reason most men never get lean isn't effort. It's that tracking food is a miserable job that collapses after a fortnight.
CalorieBot is the fix. Photograph the plate and it's logged, with your macros, in about two seconds. No weighing, no hunting through a database. It also estimates body fat from a photo, tracks your weight trend and steps, and adjusts your macros off your own data rather than a formula.
It comes with the Fit Legacy community, so you also get every training programme I've written, the weekly challenges, a room of men doing the same thing, and me answering questions in there.
14 day free trial, cancel any time.