Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Plateau?

My husband thinks I've reached a plateau on my pull ups. I don't think he's wrong, but I'm not sure what to do about it. As soon as I could do a pull up, that was awesome, but I wanted to be able to do more than 1, and to keep being able to do them.

I kept doing the workout that led me to being able to do 1, but backpacking season reduced my opportunities to workout at a gym. I ended up with a very sporadic rate of working out, completely unlike the serious, focused effort that led to number 1.

Between coming down with colds, school work and other challenges, I haven't been able to regain that focused effort on my pull up workouts until the last two weeks or so. I'm hoping that if I can get back into the swing of things, I'll be able to start seeing some improvement again, but I might not.

From the research I've done, the best way to train to do more pull ups is to do pull ups, but I don't have a pull up bar handy at home or at work. I do them when I go to the gym (3 days a week if I keep up with my workout schedule), when I go to Crossfit (4 days a week, after the workout if that day's WOD doesn't include them), and when I go grocery shopping at Winco (their cart returns are a little short, but completely workable for pull ups). 2 of the gym days overlap with the Crossfit days and I only go shopping once every 2 weeks, so that's really not enough.

I'm hoping that if I refocus on the pull up workout, and get consistent again, that my reps will increase, but I have to face the possibility that I might be reaching a plateau with that method. If I have another opportunity to attend a workshop on pull ups, then I will; I might even look outside of my normal sources to find one. But I have a hard time believing that any program will tell me much that I don't already know.

Do more pull ups!

Or lose weight... The weight loss from the nutrition challenge did seem to make the movement easier, but it also left me extra exhausted so it was hard to figure out if I had actually gotten a net benefit when it came to pull ups.

I really want to be able to do 5 pull ups in a row without dropping from the bar. And I want to be able to do more kipping pull ups without dropping. And world peace. That's not so much to ask, is it?


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