One of the oldest, yet most beneficial, exercises an athlete can do with little to no equipment is the “Pull-up.” Pull-up or Chinup is a key exercise for upper-body strength and improvement in speed. For the sake of simplicity, we are going to use the term “Pullup” as our universal movement and adjust our hand positions for each movement.

The Pull-up is a compound movement and one of the best exercises we use to improve performance and lean muscle mass with our professional athletes. The Latissimus Dorsi (Lats) are the largest muscles of the upper back, which give an athlete that Vshaped torso. Upper-back strength plays an integral part in running speed as it is a powerful locomotive to the backwards arm swing we previously talked about in earlier articles of “Improve your Speed.” At the same time, it doesn’t hurt to have a nice-looking Vshaped upper body.

There are tons of different ways to perform a pull-up and we will go over three unique pull-up variations in this installment. These pull-up variations are designed for the more advanced athlete, but we wanted to motivate and share our ideas with the readers. Have fun and see if you can perform 3 sets of 8-10 reps at a tempo of 5-0-1-0, that’s 5 seconds on the lowering portion of the lift.