I recently had a chance to attend the CrossFit Gymnastics certification course in Brooklyn, NY and wanted to share some of my class experiences with the community. It was an enriching 2-days during which I was constantly humbled and impressed often by the instructors and fellow attendees. My first “lesson” has to do with scaling – something we all do or have had to do at some point during training and Metcons here at CFH.
In addition to spending the first hour working on how we grip the pull-up bar and the basic kip while hanging from said bar, I picked up today’s lesson – “for an athlete, we want to scale the load, not the range of motion”. This resonated with me as I’ve used bands myself for pull-ups while working on strict movements and mechanics. However, not once did I think what the band might be limiting in terms of the bottom of the pull-up.
We often think of the toughest part of the pull-up, or what we want to train the most, as pulling your chin over that bar because it means we complete the rep. Sometimes we can get halfway there without a band, so when we reach for that green or blue band, we now get our chins over the bar and figure that we just need to work the top of the motion over time, typically through negatives. This is partially correct, but what is easily overlooked is that the band is providing the most assistance at the bottom of the range of motion, when we want to be engaging our lats and firing up our strong back muscles and good core position in a gymnastics position!
If we continue to use a band for pull-up assistance over time, we won’t necessarily train the initial engagement of our major muscle groups mentioned above. Naturally, when we get ambitious and try our pull-ups without a band, we are then no better off in terms of late and core engagement. It is frustrating and most of us chalk it up to needing more practice or using a smaller band, or even doing slower reps. What we really need is to work on the lat engagement while in the hollow gymnastics position and developing our power out of the bottom of the pull-up!
What’s the answer? Seated bar pull-ups! There is a tendency to think that seated bar pull-ups are easier than actually hanging from the bar and using a band – this is not the case. When executed with correct form (which your coach can help with), you will isolate your lats at the proper depth in your range of motion while seated on the floor. Over time, you can move the barbell higher and higher on the rack. You will then take on more of your own body weight while learning to engage this major muscle group under more tension at the proper range of motion to develop your strength. In addition, we can train separately our hollow position and movement on the ground, to ensure that, when we are ready for strict pull ups, we can do so confidently in the correct body position and without band assistance!
So I challenge everyone to give this a try and put the bands back on the wall. Seated pull-ups in the rack are a great way to train the initial engagement of our major pulling muscles without relying on a gymnastics kip to provide assistance to the bottom of our range of motion. Over time, you will develop more strength and see far more gains in your pull-up mechanics and strength than by relying on a band.
Hugh Green