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.
I've watched men who can leg press a stack of plates fail to get their chin over a bar. Not struggle on the fifth rep. Fail on the first, in front of people, and then make a joke about it.
I've also coached a man from nought strict pull ups to seventeen in a single workout. He didn't get there by adding more pull up days, and he wasn't a different shape from the first lot when he started.
What separates them isn't genetics and it's not effort. It's that one of them was training the lift and the other was testing it, over and over, and calling that training.
The pull up is the one lift that tells you the truth. A machine moves whatever you load it with. A bar only moves if you can actually move yourself, which is the thing being strong is supposed to mean.
strict reps. The clearest test of strength to bodyweight there is, and almost nobody over 40 can do it.
Why this one is worth getting good at
- It's the clearest test of strength there is, 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
Nobody is impressed by your bench. Ten strict pull ups is a different conversation.
The reason most men never get there isn't 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.
Read this bit before you buy
This is for you if
- You can do somewhere between nought and six strict reps
- You've been stuck at the same number for months
- You want one clear thing to get good at
- You can train at home with a bar, or in a gym
Give it a miss if
- You can already do ten clean reps
- You want a full body programme, not a specialisation
- You're not willing to lose a few pounds to make it easier
What you'll know by the end
- 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
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 have to pull. Two men with identical backs will have wildly different rep counts if one is two stone heavier.
This is what you're getting
- Get your first strict pull up, from nought if that's where you are
- Go from a few hard reps to ten, on a programme written for exactly that
- Train it three, four or five days a week, at home or in a gym
- Stop losing reps to bodyweight you didn't need to be carrying
- Know what to do on the days you're not pulling
- Every session, tool and video, on any device
- On your account about a minute after you buy
- One payment. Nothing renews, nothing expires
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Also in the membership, with CalorieBot and the community, for $49 a month.
Above the Bar, $27, yours for good
One payment. No subscription, nothing to cancel, and it doesn't expire. In your inbox about a minute after you buy it.
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