If you are one of the many people who struggle with pull ups then you need to go through a progression or purchase an aid to help you in the quest to build a strong back. Below you will find a few suggestions.

The first suggestion is to pull a chair up to the chin up bar and use it to get you in a position where your chin is above the bar. Then pull your feet up and hang in this position as long as you can. Or you can slowly lower yourself (resisting as you lower) to the point where your arms are fully extended. Continue to repeat.

You can also use the chair to help give you a “leg up.” Place the chair slightly in front of you so that the back of the chair is facing you. Then place one foot on the back of the chair to help push your way upward. But only push as much as you need to get to the top. This is a back exercise not a leg exercise.

You can also do a slightly simpler exercise (but still challenging) to help in your progression toward doing a pull up. Inverted rows are a great exercise for this.

If you have a few dollars to spend then one of the most useful things that you can buy is a heavy duty pull up assist band. You can hook them around the bar as shown below and then place your foot in the other end of the loop. These will help lighten the weight that you will be pulling up. You should start with a band that is strong enough to allow you to do at least 5 pull ups. As you become stronger you can use a lighter band. Before long you will be doing pull ups on your own.

There are many who will argue that body weight training can never be as effective at building muscle as traditional weight lifting. This would definitely be true if you were trying to develop the physique of a bodybuilder but if that is not your goal you might want to rethink that statement.

I understand why it is that certain people think that body weight exercise is not as effective at building muscle. Many perceive this type of training to merely be an exercise in endurance. It is simply thought to be a form of exercise to increase your overall conditioning (much like the military uses the exercises for). However, I have continually been impressed with the upper body development of male gymnasts. There arms are huge in many instances and their strength is unparalleled.

The problem is that many have a much too limited view of what bodyweight exercise involves. The average person believes it is not much more than pushups and body weight squats. The never move past the most basic of exercises.
They are correct that the simplest of bodyweight exercises will probably not provide them with the amount of muscle that they are looking to build. They need to move through bodyweight exercise progressions.

When you can master a number of sets of standard pushups you need to increase the difficulty. You can simply start by elevating your legs and performing an incline pushup. However, you ultimately want to work your way up to be able to do one arm pushups. These take quite a bit of strength and can build a sizable amount of muscle.

You can also add resistance to the standard pushup, pullup, or inverted row by adding weighted vests or by wrapping your body in chains. Now, I guess when you add something to the exercise it is technically no longer a body weight exercise but for our purpose we will still call in body weight training.

Some body weight exercises are more superior for building muscle that anything that you can do with weights. One of those exercises is a pull up. They are much preferable to a weighted pull down. I would also argue that handstand pushups are superior to military press and that glute ham raises are better at building muscle that leg curls. And I will take a wheel rollout any day of the week over an ab machine.

So if you want to build muscle don’t exclude body weight training from your arsenal. Continue to progress onto more difficult forms of body weight exercise and I believe you will be pleased with the results.

The simplicity of the workout is amazing. On the face of it, you will think that it is easy to perform. But then as you try the workout you will quickly change your tune. The baseball players had to perform the workout for 30 minutes straight. I recommend that you try it for 20 minutes and if you feel that you can continue then by all means go ahead.

The workout consists of only two simple exercises at very low reps. But one set is performed after the other for the entire time period without any rest in between. Are you ready and up to the challenge? If so give it a shot. Here is what they did.

Pushup 2 Reps
Squat 2 Reps

That was the entire workout. Two pushups followed by two squats over and over again for 20 minutes. It looks simplistic but the workout is brutal and I can guarantee that it will burn fat in the process.

However, it does not produce much of an overall body effect. It will burn a few calories but it will begin to take a toll on your joints as you get older and does nothing to provide for the conditioning and strengthening of the entire body. What if you could put together a 20 minute exercise program where you could get a whole body workout, burn more calories and not bore you to tears while you were doing it.

Below you will find such a program. There are four exercises below. Perform each one of them in order for the prescribed repetitions and without rest. This would be one set. Perform as many sets as you can in a 20 minute period of time. There should not be any rest between the exercises. Move from one exercise to the next in a steady fashion. If you get a little worn out in the middle or towards the end then give yourself a quick 30 – 60 second break but at that time on to the end of your workout. I think when you are done you will see how powerful these workouts can be for burning fat.
Here are the four bodyweight exercises.

Burpees 5 Reps
Pushups 5 Reps
Squats 10 Reps
Knees to Elbows 10 Reps

Record how many sets that you were able to complete and the next time that you use ths particular workout try to improve on that number.

Calisthenics today is only viewed by most as a form of conditioning. However, if you go back to the days of the ancients, it was understood as a strength and conditioning system. It allowed fighters to develop maximum strength for battle and the musculature that intimidated those that they faced.

If you saw the movie 300, you saw the story of 300 Spartans who due to their great conditioning and musculature and battle skills held off an army of 120,000 Persians until further Greek forces could arrive at the Battle of Thermopolylae. When Herodotus, the Greek historian, records this story he mentions that Xerxes had sent out a scout party and had seen the Spartan warriors training their bodies with calisthenics. What is considered to be the greatest warrior race that has ever been recorded used calisthenics or bodyweight exercises are their main training regimen. If it was good enough for the Spartans who had to head into battle, it should be more than sufficient for us, many of whom sit behind a desk all day. In fact, since the movie a number of bodyweight exercise programs that have been designed around the training of the actors who played the Spartans in the movie have sprung up.

The Spartans weren’t the only ones who believed in the power of body weight exercises. The great athletes of the original Olympic Games trained with calisthenics. This was documented by Pausanius. In fact, you can see evidence of this type of training taking place on many painted scenes or carving from early Greece. The Greeks understood that body weight exercises provided an athletic, muscular body that performed well in battle and competition.

Perhaps we should spend more time on body weight calisthenics instead of glorifying throwing around a bunch of iron. Weight lifting has its place but it never should come at the expense of performing exercises with your own bodyweight. At the very least they should live in harmony together.

Let me describe how it happened. The last couple of days it has rained quite a bit where I live. In fact, it poured for most of the weekend. Yesterday (Saturday), I went to watch my son play baseball at college so it left only Sunday to get my grass cut. Unfortunately, it rained most of the day. Finally, I was able to get outside in the late afternoon to cut what was a pretty wet yard. But when you have only certain times to get it done you need to take advantage of what you are presented with.

Now I am cheap. All of my neighbors have riding lawnmowers. I do not. I still give it a go with my old standby push mower. I have no intentions of changing either. I don’t have a huge yard. It normally takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to cut my grass.

Well when I went out to cut the grass about halfway through it began to rain lightly again and dinner time was just around the corner. So I had the great idea of jogging while cutting grass. My 17 year old daughter was watching through our large window that overlooks the back yard and was laughing at her dad looking rather weird running with a lawn mower.

Now this is not something you would do everyday unless you want to run with your lawnmower off through your yard each day. If you do that then your neighbors may wonder what caused you to go crazy. But jogging while cutting grass is quite challenging. Your heart rate will elevate and I guarantee that you will burn quite a few calories and burn fat in the process. Since you have to cut grass each week anyway you may want to give it a try. If you have a riding lawnmower then maybe you want to put it away every now and then and break out the push mower. It will provide you a great workout and burn some fat in the process. You will even get your grass cutting duties done quicker. Give it a try.

I was reading the other day (can’t quite remember where) and the individual who was writing the article made mention of the fact that the football team that he played on in college dreaded the bodyweight conditioning exercises most of all because they took so much out of you.

Just yesterday, I took the day off and made a 90 minute trip to watch my son play baseball for his college. While I was sitting in the bleachers watching the game I heard a soccer player from his college talking about the burpee exercises that they had to do for conditioning. They were extremely tough.

You can get a tremendous workout from bodyweight exercises alone. They are some of the most effective exercises for shedding fat and losing weight as well. Below is a sample workout that I will be performing tomorrow for my bodyweight conditioning segment.

Perform 5 rounds with about a 1 – 2 minute rest between each round. Within the round you should not have any rest between exercises. Move from exercise to the next.

Burpees (10)
Mountain Climbers (15 each leg)
Squat Jumps (10)
Atomic Push Ups (10)
Knees To Elbows (10)
Tuck Jumps (10)

In case you are not familiar with tuck jumps, knees to elbows or an atomic push up then you can watch the videos below. If you do not have a TRX suspension trainer then you can substitute 15 – 20 push ups for the atomic push up.

Tuck Jumps

Knees To Elbows

Atomic Push Up

I built a platform out of 2 x 4s from some wood I had laying around the house. I put a 3/4″ piece of plywood on the top of this very primitive platform. It is quite sturdy despite its ugly looks. There are other more attractive options that you can build so that you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on plyometric boxes. There is a design that Crossfit has published that is quite good. It is even slanted to help to possibly save your shins a bit if you miss a jump. My plyo platform is not so forgiving. You can find the pdf file for building the box here.

Here are a few videos of box jumps to get you started in case you are not sure exactly what they are. Give them a try. Use them in place of your regular cardio workout. You will burn many more fat calories with box jumping than you will with a leisurely jog through the neighborhood.

You can do dips on a variety of different things if you don’t have access to a health club. You can use two chairs that are pushed together. Or you can make a dip station of your own. There are probably several plans that you can find on the internet but I saw one from Matt Wichlinski of the Strength Shop in Virginia Beach, VA. It is part of a larger video that shows some of his homemade equipment. The dip station is made out of 2″ PVC. I will be trying to make one in the coming weeks. When I do I will put the measurements that I used online. In the meantime you can view the video and have a go at it yourself if you want to.

“I didn’t grow up – my parents didn’t have a lot of money. My high school didn’t have a lot of money to afford a lot of the expensive weights. You know all this stuff. They used that as an excuse. I started doing push-ups and sit-ups during commercials as I was watching TV. And started doing about, sometimes 2,000 push-ups, 3,000 sit-ups, 1500 pull-ups, 1000 dips, or different things like that. I started creating different hand positions for all that, then I learned that could work you out. ”

All you have to do is to look at Herschel’s physique even today to realize that there is great merit to bodyweight exercise. It requires hard work but it can provide great gains in strength and muscle.

Bodyweight exercises such as pull ups and push ups and sit ups allow you to follow the principle of progression. You can build muscle when you progressively overload your muscle. Increase the number of push ups you do every day. Increase the number of pull ups that you do every day. Eric Cressey just made a post recently that stated if you did one set pull ups to failure every day for one month that you would double the number of push ups that you could do in one set.

It is based on the idea of progression. If you want to increase strength and build muscle then embark on a program of progressive bodyweight exercises. You will be amazed by the results. Maybe one day you will build up to 1000 push ups like Herschel Walker.