I remember it like it was yesterday, I was studying for finals at school and my stress was going through the roof. I barely had time to sleep, but worst of all I couldn’t find much time to train due to the heavy workload of essays, assignments, tests and orals. When you are in the training game it is good to always have some sort of goal. Improving my compound lifts and getting a thick and wide back were at the top of my priority list as far as training was concerned. I thought to myself, “What can I do during this stressful school period to make the best with the time I have while getting closer to my goal?”; Pull-ups and Chin-ups. Luckily I have a pull-up bar in my room with many different grips and handles to play with.
The plan was to do 300 pull-ups or chin-ups a day for a full week. It didn’t matter if it was underhand, neutral grip, over under grip or overhand, as long as I got 300 pull-ups a day for a week. Since I was very pressed for time I would do my workouts with Pavel’s GTG (Greasing the groove) style which means that I would spread the workload throughout the day. I would wake up and do 50 chin-ups, then if I saw any kind of bar that I could hang from throughout the day then I would do more, then before bed I would do however many I was missing. I noticed my back was getting a lot wider and it felt good.
After the week was finally over I thought that I was going to have more time on my hands so I would be able to get back to the gym but I actually got even more work to do for school, but I didn’t stress and I told myself, “What will happen if I do 300 pull-ups a day for another week?”. I did them again for a second week and believe it or not I even did it a third week. That means that I did a total of 6300 pull-ups in only 21 days which is a lot. The crazy thing was that I didn’t even get any elbow pain from repeating the same movement over and over again. This is probably due to the fact that I was using good form, wasn’t doing them weighted and wasn’t doing any other exercises besides some dips here and there. In the end I got a few things:
• More mental toughness and discipline from doing the same thing over and over even though sometimes I didn’t want to.
• Wider lats which gave me a nicer v-taper.
• Bigger arms as well. The chin-up and pull-up work the biceps to a great extent but did you know that the triceps have to contract with the lats during pull-ups? They aren’t the main muscle you should be feeling, but they still get some work which is why I would wake up with sore triceps on some days from doing a lot of pull-ups. My forearms also got bigger.
• My back also got a bit of thickness even though I was only doing vertical pulling.
Conclusion:
I just wanted to share my experience because it was funny how I pretty much broke all of the rules in the book and made progress. After those 3 weeks I was finally able to see my lats from the front view which looks pretty cool. Do I advise the readers of this site to be doing 300 pull-ups per day? Of course not, but I have no regrets on the whole experience either. All I am saying is that sometimes it is ok to break the rules and just test your mental toughness to see what you are really made of.