M2M Day 280: For some reason, I imagined this would be much easier

Max Deutsch
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For August, my goal is to complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups.

I’m officially one week into the pull-up challenge. I’m definitely getting stronger, but not at the rate I was hoping, so I need to start thinking about ways I can augment my pure strength approach.

With this in mind, I decided today to experiment with hanging rests. In other words, I wanted to see if I could somehow rest while just hanging lock-armed on the bar, allowing me to theoretically extend my single set pull-up maximum.

Today, I worked out at a friend’s place, and on my way over, as I was visualizing how I would incorporate these hanging rests into a set of pull-ups, I was genuinely worried — Worried that I would easily do 40 pull-ups in this way and that the rest of the month’s narrative would be ruined.

Luckily, at least for the narrative, it’s a lot harder to rest on the bar than I thought. Although, I’m not sure today’s experiment was fully informative: I was too anxious and didn’t allow myself to rest for long enough on the bar.

Tomorrow, perhaps I’ll try resting for a full 20–30 seconds between each grouping of pull-ups. I’m not sure this will make things easier, but it’s worth a try.

Also, if I want to use this hanging method as a way to rest, I clearly need to increase my grip strength. Especially if I want to shake out one arm at a time — which may be more tiring than helpful anyway.

I’ll continue experimenting with this on-the-bar resting concept over the next few days, and see if I can get anything useful out of it.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

Max Deutsch

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Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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