January’s challenge: pull-ups
Pull-ups, every day, for 30 days.
I like to keep fit, but only occasionally lift weights. A few years ago a developed a good habit of doing push-ups while I make my morning coffee.
But pull-ups have never been fun. I’ve always hated doing them — they make me feel sick and the best I could manage was about 3. I don’t even do the proper ones — I do the underhand way, and the pedants out there may even tell me that’s actually a chin-up.
In the past, I’d even bought a “Chin-up Max — Pull up Assist Band”, which does actually make a big difference, as long as you can be bothered to use it!
Why pull-ups as the first challenge?
Seeing as I’d only come up with the idea to do the 30 day challenge on the first day of the month, I needed something I could get straight into without too much effort. The bar was already in my house, strung up to a beam, so I didn’t need to purchase any equipment. I already wanted to do pull-ups, and had done for a while, so starting should be easy.
I knew day one was a write-off because of the hangover. As it happened, day two was too (never miss twice!). Procrastination was looking likely and, like some many others who make New Year’s Resolutions, this project of mine could fail before it got started.
I needed a strategy. I looked into the depths of my procrastination-beating experience, and told myself: “make it so small, you can’t fail”…
The strategy
Quickly, without much thinking, I devised a method for growth that meant I’d start small, yet would do more pull-ups as the time went on:
- day 3: 3 sets of 3 pull-ups
- day 4: 4 sets of 4 pull-ups
- day 5: 5 sets of 5 pull-ups
- etc, etc
Revising the strategy
For the first few days, things were going well. The pyramid of exponential growth, which had indeed been easy to get into, was suiting my ability. I wasn’t overwhelmed… to begin with.
If you take the time to do the maths, it was more-or-less impossible to continue at the rate I was going — by day 30 I’d be doing 900 pull-ups. Even if I spread them out evenly through the day, I might be doing 50 an hour on average. A few days before I couldn’t do 3!
I revised the strategy as soon as I hit day 8. In reality, I’d found my limit. 8 in a row felt too hard — the quality was poor, and I was bordering on quitting. 7 I could just about manage without hating myself.
The new strategy was to stick to sets of 7, but multiply the sets by the calendar day:
- day 9: 9 sets of 7
- day 10: 10 sets of 7
How did I do?
Well, the strategy was still pretty ambitious as it turns out — not because 7 pull-ups a few times a day is too difficult, but because just finding opportunities to stop what I’m doing to bust out 7 pull-ups is pretty impractical.
By the end of it though, I’d only missed 3 days — one from a hangover, and two more from a planned weekend away. But I’d still missed my target of sets pretty much every day.
I wasn’t too disheartened — Seinfeld said the consistency is important, not the results.
The set counts really fade off after towards the end of the month, but there’s a good excuse for this — after the 7th, I began training for a charity boxing match. Not only was intensely tiring and timing consuming, I believe the pull-ups were being detrimental to the quality of my boxing training. After all, they both work the shoulders pretty hard.
Analysis
I’m pretty pleased with the progress I made and the use of the 30 day challenge as a motivator. I can now do 7 pull-ups comfortably, of better quality, with a deeper range and with more control. It’s a massive improvement from the 3 I used to struggle with.
I seriously doubt I would’ve achieved what I did achieve if it wasn’t for the structure imposed by the 30 day challenge. It really helped me stick to the task. The routine is a good one to do for 30 days, but clearly the measurement needs some refinement.
And, at least I’ve had some time to think of my next challenge…
