M2M Day 274: Attempting to complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For August, my goal is to complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups.

Today, I start a new month and a new challenge: With only one month of practice, can I complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups.

Why pull-ups?

I’ve been lifting weights seriously since my sophomore year of college, mainly focusing on my chest, shoulders, arms, core, and (sometimes) legs. In other words, I’ve been singularly neglecting my back.

As a result, for this month’s physical challenge, I wanted an excuse to concentrate specifically on my back (the weakest part of my body), hopefully building a habit that I can continue even once the month is over.

Since pull-ups are unquestionably the most popular and most standardized back exercise, I figured this would be the perfect way to quantify the strength in my back and track my progress over the month.

Plus, I’ve always just wanted to be able to do a lot of pull-ups, so there’s also that.

Why 40?

After deciding to focus on pull-ups, I needed to set my quantitative goal. In line with my other challenges, I wanted to determine the number of pull-ups that would be considered at the level of expert performance.

I searched YouTube for pull-up records, but had trouble finding a clear standard: Most of the videos featured the “How many pull-ups can you do in 60 seconds” record, which allows resting, instead of the “How many pull-ups can you do without stopping” record.

After a little bit more searching, I found a video by Nile Wilson, who is a British gymnast (he won bronze at Rio in 2016) and a YouTube vlogger.

In one particular video, Nile and two other members of the UK team conduct a maximum pull-up competition (in the title, it says “Chin Ups”, but, in the video, they actually do pull-ups).

In the video, the winner of the competition completes 40 consecutive pull-ups, which seems like the perfect target (since it’s both highly aggressive and a nice round number). So, I’ve decided to adopt 40 pull-ups as my personal goal.

If I can match the top performance of Olympic athletes, I should be able to make the case that I’ve reached an expert level of pull-up performance.

Defining success

To complete this month’s challenge, I must fulfill three criteria:

1. I must complete one continuous set of 40 pull-ups. Once I’m on the bar, I must do 40 consecutive pull-ups before touching my feet back to the floor. If I want to rest by hanging on the bar, I’m allowed to do so, as long as I stay suspended above the ground at all times. In other words, continuous implies that I never leave the bar — it doesn’t necessarily imply that I complete the pull-ups one immediately after the other.
2. I must maintain strict form. In Nile’s video, you’ll notice that the gymnasts do a fair amount of kipping, which is a technique where the athlete oscillates his body and pumps his legs in order to create additional momentum. For my challenge, I’m not allowed to kip. Instead, I must keep my body as straight as possible, and only pull from my back. (I may tolerate a little body wiggle, but I’m definitely not allowed to pump/kick my legs).
3. I must lower myself to at least 90 degrees. Even though the gymnasts use a significant amount of kipping, their range of motion is impressive: They are lifting their chins above the bar, extending all the way down until their arms are nearly locked out, and then repeating. For my challenge, I will aim for the greatest range of motion, but my personal requirement is that I lower myself to the point where my arms are bent at 90 degrees, but not necessarily more. This will ensure that, for each pull-up, my head is at least going fully above and fully below the bar.

My starting point

Sometimes, if I don’t work out for a while, and then return to a full-intensity workout, I become and remain sore for a week or more, preventing me from maintaining a reasonable workout cadence.

Thus, to ensure that I was prepared and able to recovery in a timely fashion, I’ve been warming up my body prior to this challenge. In particular, since February, I’ve been practicing my pull-ups once per week for 45 minutes.

In that time, I’ve increased my maximum pull-ups from 8 to 18.

While 18 is certainly a respectable number of pull-ups, it’s quite far from 40, so I still have plenty of work ahead of me this month.

I’m excited to get started…

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is a product manager at Intuit, the creator of Somebody.io and Rightspeed, and the guinea pig for Month to Master.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.