Plague of Strength

I think at this point I have only written about them three times (and have another article about them dropping next week), but pullups are essentially my secret weapon. If I skip the gym, am feeling the absurd amount of junk calories I’ve been eating lately, or just feel like being “productive,” I do pullups. I don’t do them every day like some compulsive organic robot, because this isn’t a “challenge”- I just like doing the fucking things. Of all of the exercises I can think, pullups are the only thing you can do that will keep your physique in reasonably awesome shape if you just rely on them exclusively for a few weeks.

Clearly, your legs will shrink, but I’m just referring purely to physical appearance in a tshirt and jeans. You can vary your grip and get your shoulders involved, and if nothing else you can just do isometric holds with them and hit your tris just flexing the fuck out of everything. Is it ideal? Fuck no, but I’m talking bare bones training. OPbviously, if you’re surviving just on pullups, you’ll throw in at least pushups, and the two exercises if done in high volume will maintain most of your upper body size while you’re busy being poor or whatever for a month or two.

My method for pullups is unique to me, insofar as I know. I do endless sets of ten. And when I say endless, I mean I will generally on non-training days do at least 30 minutes of pullups while listening to a podcast. I’ll do my sets of ten with rest periods randing from a sip of water and shaking my arms out to maybe 60 seconds, cranking out as many pullups as I can in the time allotted. I don’t count beyond the ten reps per set, because I don’t get a cookie or a gold star for doing a rep more than yesterday, and frankly don’t care- I do this because I enjoy lifting, not because I want to tell someone about what I did.

Which is why I hate writing these fucking things, but here we are, haha. Yesterday was maybe 150 pullups throughout the day, followed by about 100 minutes of arms at Life Time. The day before that I did 300+ pullups and a bunch of band curls (didn’t hit the gym), and the day prior to that was mostly shoulders, I think.

You’ll note I did far less biceps than triceps- that’s because of all of the pullups. I figured I would spend the majority of my time on triceps, because my bis are sore as fuck at the moment.

Skullcrushers– 2 x 15-20 x 75lbs (I think the bar is 25); 3 x 10-14 x 95 (2 second descent/ 1 ascent); 3 x 5 x 125; 5 x 3 x 145

Reverse-Grip Cambered Bar Pushdowns supersetted with High-Cable Curls with the same bar– 8 x 10-30

Pushdowns– 3 x 4-6

Thumbless Reverse-Grip Cable Curls– 6 x 6-12

High-Cable Rope Curls supersetted with Rope Pushdowns– maybe 3 or 4 sets of 20-50 reps, just fucking around as I waited for Tara to finish chatting with someone.

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!