My month long quest towards 20 unbroken strict pull-ups

and miserably failing at it.

As I was cheerfully ringing in 2018 with unbounded positivity, I stumbled upon Sam Altman’s tweet on setting monthly goals instead of annual ones and going after them. Setting small short term goals and going full steam after them sounded fun and I was game.

Also, I wanted to do this as something fun, something that I would enjoy, something that would have a tangible impact on my personality, also something that I wouldn’t have bothered to do otherwise. I was hooked when I came across Max Deutsch’s 40 pull ups in a month and decided I was going to do it.

Like most people new to fitness I had always struggled with pull-ups, it took me little over three months of deliberate training to get over 5 strict pull-ups in a row.

For reference this is how a strict pull up is done. Wide grip, straight body, no momentum, chin all the way over the bar and then all the way down to a dead hang.

Realizing that I had taken a lofty challenge, I wanted to assess where I stand so that I could layout my training to the end. I ended up convincing a gym buddy into capturing a video of me doing pull-ups.

Please mute the audio and save yourself from some bad music.

Turns out I could only do 10 pull ups and I was going to have to build enough strength and endurance to double my baseline in 3 weeks. The video was really helpful, reviewing it again was quite revealing, I realized that my form's a bit off and wasn’t really going all the way down into dead hangs.

With what I thought was a solid plan, I went straight in.

I was going to:

• Get 20+ strict-pull ups every day in as few sets as possible to improve my endurance
• Do weighted chin ups and dips once a week to strengthen my lats and triceps.
• Practice my progressions to L-Sit pull-ups and Dragon Flag holds every other day, because I wanted to have fun.
• Continue with my normal compound lifts.

Today, as January is about to end, I remembered that I was to get 20 consecutive pull-ups(to be honest, I’d totally forgotten about the end goal while training for it!) and put myself on the bar.

Please mute the audio :)

Looking at the video was a bummer, that was nowhere close to 20. I was a little bit sad for a while and then retrospection helped me gain perspective.

There were are a few silver linings:

• My pull-up form has drastically improved and I’d learnt to pace myself.
• I’ve gained close to 2 kgs of muscle and lost a teeny bit of fat. I went up from 64 kgs to 66 kgs.
• My L-Sit pull-ups went from 0 to 3 and Dragon Flag holds from 0 seconds to 15 seconds.

All that being said, this attempt was really humbling, I’m more or less in the same place where I started, my best attempt got me to 12 pull-ups in a row, a 20% growth, still way off from the original goal. But that’s okay. I know, I’m a little over the deadline, but the game is not over yet, perhaps a better planned and more deliberate training would help, if you want to help me plan my training/nutrition feel free to send me an email. (last_name.first_name@gmail.com)