The pull-up is a major fitness benchmark for many people, especially for women, who often have to work much harder in order to be able to do one. If you can do a pull-up as a woman, you can feel really proud of yourself, which is plenty of reason to work toward being able to execute one for the first time. Regardless of your gender, to help you get there, here are some steps you can take.
First, you’ll want to work on bent-over dumbbell rows to improve your back’s pulling strength. This will help you bridge the gap until you’re able to move on to inverted bodyweight rows, a way to start working on pulling the weight of your own body.
Once you can comfortably execute three sets of eight reps of inverted bodyweight rows, you can move on to assisted pull-ups of which there are several varieties, including assisted pull-up machine pull-ups, band-assisted pull-ups, and chair or box-assisted pull-ups.
Concurrently, you should also work on pull-up negatives, where you jump up into the top of a pull-up position and slowly lower yourself down, and pull-ups holds, where you simply hold at the top of a pull-up position for ten seconds or as long as you can.
As you train, progressively lower the amount of assistance you are using and increase the number of negatives and the length of the holds that you do until you are ready to do your first pull-up. Congratulations!
