This article is a continuation of last week’s article.
My objective in writing these articles is to help athletes customize their training within a group environment to achieve their first STRICT pull-up. Coaches will also benefit from reading these articles because I’m laying out many of the considerations I make when programming for groups and individuals. Over the past decade of coaching it has taken a lot of research, trial and error to get this right.
To quickly recap last week, the two primary reasons why the average CrossFitting female takes a long time to achieve their first pull-up are:
1) Inadequate strength to bodyweight; eat responsibly and put in some time strength training and that is usually enough to make a big difference
2) Inappropriate use of bands; the band does not appropriately challenge the strength curve. I addressed a couple of preferred methods for training pull-ups without bands.
Here is another consideration…
3) Inadequate (or excessive) volume.
First, let me define volume. When we refer to volume of training, we generally are talking about the number of repetitions per week. If there is a weight involved, then it is usually the number of repetitions multiplied by the weight. Most importantly, the REASON we talk about volume is that it gives us an objective data point around which to assess an athlete’s capacity for recovery. After all, training is not enough to make you stronger, you have to recover from training to get stronger.
Getting the volume of training right for an entire group of people to achieve optimal performance relative to their individual capacity is impossible. We have figured out ways of group programming that are better than others, but the reality is that every single time we move an athlete to individualized programming they accomplish more (providing they are mature enough as athletes to not require leaning on the group competitiveness or atmosphere).
In 2012 I trained four women for a competition which involved a repetition based bench press event. I attempted to start them all off on similar training protocols, but it was clear right off the hop that different strategies would be required. The strength deficit with two of the athletes was very significant, and the other two athletes, while much stronger, were both responding differently to the training volume (the amount of repetitions per week). One was progressing, the other was not. With the two weaker athletes, I also had a situation where one was responding to the training stimulus, and the other week after week reported lacklustre results.
In a situation like this, where you have at least one athlete responding well to the training, it’s tempting to say, “well, clearly the program is not at fault, because look how so and so is doing well. Maybe it’s nutrition. Maybe it’s sleep.” In other words, “maybe it’s your fault”. The benefit of individualized programming is that, even if it WAS nutrition or sleep (which it wasn’t… these four ladies were very dedicated to all aspects of their training), I could adjust the training load to the individual.
What we ended up with was two women on moderate volume training programs with different emphasis (one on strength endurance and the other on increasing maximal strength), one woman on a low volume training program and another on a high volume training program. The unfortunate part is that I didn’t “dial” in for the low volume athlete until too close to the competition AND I doubted myself for at least a couple of weeks and tried to increase the volume. My observations were that when this athlete was in the “sweet spot” with volume, her strength increased week by week. If I added so much as two extra sets in the week, it was a setback – beyond her capacity for recovery.
Interestingly, both the low volume and high volume athlete responded really well to higher volume low body training.
ALL THIS TO SAY that a good group program will tend to target the middle of the bell curve, but the reality is that there will be outliers on either side. Some athletes will respond better if they cut back on volume relative to the group. We have implemented this from time to time by having athletes reduce the volume of conditioning work they are doing in order to be capable of recovering from the strength work. Likewise, some athletes will need to add more volume. This is assuming that your coach is programming for pull-up improvement in the first place. If not, then likely everyone would benefit from some additional pull-up strength work. For example, in the current phase of training of our Building program, we are only programming specific pull-up strength development once per week, because that is appropriate for our “bell curve” and the goals of the group. An athlete who needs more strict pull-ups will need to trade out some other work later in the week (probably muscle-ups), and maybe even add another training session to work on pull-ups.
For women in need of more upper body strength, they can usually work on it 3 days per week. In our Foundation program we address it 2 days per week (shooting for the middle of the bell curve). So, if someone is already responding pretty well to the group program and isn’t feeling run down by it, they could try to add extra work. Otherwise, if progress is stalled, it might be worth looking into spreading the upper body work over 3 sessions rather than 2, for example, or even just cutting back the number of sets to see if the athlete recovers better.
If you’re at a loss for what to do within the context of your group program and you really want to improve your pull-up capacities, then talk with your coach about appropriate adjustments to the training. If, after a few weeks, that’s not working, then you might need to consider working one-on-one with a coach experienced in individualization of training prescriptions.
I’ve got a few more tips and tricks to discuss in a future article. Until then: dial in the diet, keep up the strength training, grab a partner for assistance in your pull-up sets, and track your pull-up training volume in order to help yourself and your coach to better understand how you should customize your training to reach your goals.