Fighters Only

Issue 107

November 2013

Sports scientist, TUF 14 cast member and full-time coach, Paul McVeigh presents his best conditioning tips. Isometric strength is vital for fight sports, so pull yourself into contention with FO’s guide to a body-weight staple .

As a strength coach, one of my goals is to make my athletes great at pull-ups. The pull-up variations are a great tool for developing posterior chain strength, an attribute that’s very important in combat sports and grappling exchanges in particular. Another reason to put some time in to developing the pull-up is that people who do tend to have less shoulder problems.

If you’re a guy who is on the lighter side, banging out sets of pull-ups might seem like nothing special for you. But for heavier guys and women, the pull-up can seem like an insurmountable challenge. It’s not. With a proper plan of attack and dedication to training almost anyone can benefit from this movement.

I’ve been training a group of ladies recently and, after just 12 weeks, five out of the eight have been smashing body-weight pull-ups, with the remainder well on their way to achieving the same goal in the near future – and I hear girls can’t do pull-ups. Well, they can in our weights room.

There are a number of stages we can go through to progress from zero pull-up ability to body weight and beyond. I initially suggest spending three weeks on each stage, but as everyone’s rate of progress varies, I tend to let athletes progress through the stages as soon as they’ve mastered the previous one.

STAGE ONE: HANG TOUGH

So, let’s start with an athlete who can grab the bar, but getting anywhere after that just isn’t going to happen. Here we would start with isometric hangs. The athlete stands on a bench, jumps up to the finish position and hangs out there. When a target time is achieved the athlete steps down to the bench and the set is finished.

This builds the athlete’s strength at the top end of the movement and develops the musculature required in further stages. It also removes some of the intimidation factor that is associated with the movement.

When the athlete can display the clinging ability of an incredibly stubborn ape we can move on to the next stage. For eccentric lowers the athlete again starts at the top but this time slowly allows themselves to drop towards the ground. Once at the bottom, step back up to the top to begin another rep.

The first two stages can be combined if the athlete is up to it. A long isometric hold at the top followed by an eccentric lowering. Six seconds in the hang and lower for a few sets is a good benchmark to aim for.

STAGE TWO: ON THE PULL

To get a feel for the actual concentric movement, band assisted pull-ups are great. The thicker the band the easier the pull-up becomes. This allows the athlete to see progression as the move through thinner and thinner bands offering less and less assistance. After a few weeks of this the athlete is usually ready and successfully achieves a full range of motion body-weight pull-up.

So, the athlete can master a single pull-up, and that’s great, but we want more. Much more. Pull-up clusters are a cool way to bump the rep numbers up. The athlete performs a single then has a 10-second break and does another rep again followed by another rest.

The set is preformed in this way for a few cycles. The idea is that the mini rest periods allow the athlete to preform a number of pull-ups that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get in a single traditional set.

STAGE THREE: BEYOND BODY WEIGHT

Smashing out chin-ups like a boss is very cool but as you probably expected we can take the progression further. Adding reps is great but after 12 or so reps becomes easy I prefer to add weight to the movement. A few kilos added to a dipping belt can make an exercise you owned own you.

You could progress like this forever, adding weight and messing with rep ranges, but I prefer to make the switch to tempo-based training. With tempo training we alter the total time under tension. Similar to what was covered in the early stages, a number of hangs and extended lowering can be used to increase the movement’s difficulty.

I feel this variation is so important for combat sports. How many times while grappling is isometric strength important, but we rarely train it in the weights room? Master the tempo pull-up and enjoy an increase in your crushing mojo.