Ground rows v's pullups

20 hours ago, Andy Desak 36466 said:

That's not because pullups are bad for you early on, Josh... its because that's a stupid workout. Doing that much of just about anything will get you injured.

Totally agree with you on this--pull-ups are awesome. 

In my case I was feeling twinges after doing just 10-20 pull-ups per day for 10 days. You can do damage quickly even at volumes that don't seem that crazy or excessive. 

On 24/03/2017 at 4:50 PM, Everett Carroll said:

Dropping pull-ups until you have progressed to them is going to protect your joints from injury and free up your time to focus on other areas of your training that are more important. Consider them unnecessary for now until you attend to more pressing components of your training like preparing the connective tissue in your elbows. A little play is okay, but be wary of getting carried away. You want to give your elbows the recovery they need after your UB workouts. 

Totally agree. I could do a fair few pull ups in a single set before i joined GB F1.  Now becuase of not prepping my joints over the years of pull ups, lifting I've got very mild chronic golfers elbow thats starts to hurt during pull ups. I joined F1 because i began to  understand i hadnt prepared my joints and by doing things like sets of 15 reps, single arm hangs, weighted pull ups on unprepared older joints is asking for trouble. In fact im just about to start a protocol to get rid of golfers elbow that means no pulling exercise (PE2) for 3 months. This is in foresight so i when i reach pull ups in the future i can do that PE without pain! Ironic.

Id say leave the pull ups. If you cant do them now so what. Theres no rush. Is there something in the meantime you need to do them for or are just chasing numbers for ego? 

Prepare your joints, then youll crush pull ups and then if you really want to then add things like GTG or the russian figther pull up program. Pull up numbers are pretty easy to increase if you program them right. Tendon ligament health is also pretty easy to ruin.

But before you get the numbers i'd say listen to Coach and the coaches. My wild guess is Coach knows more than anyone in this forum and theres a reason why his 40 year experience programs them a particular way. Otherwise why are people even here if they dont use the programming?

On 3/24/2017 at 4:50 PM, Everett Carroll said:

ropping pull-ups until you have progressed to them is going to protect your joints from injury and free up your time to focus on other areas of your training that are more important

There has been some interesting thoughts on this topic. Personally I have dropped the pullups and concentrating 100% on ground rows because as we all know it is a difficult progression so therefore i think it deserves full attention.

I have a full log of my pullup progression since I restarted them 4 months ago so it will be interesting to compare the results over another 3 months when the time comes and see what has changed.

If you like pulls ups and can do them controlled with decent form then coach has consistently recommended putting a maintenance   set of anything like that at the end of a workout.  I personally lost a lot of my pull up ability while working through rows etc. and wish I had kept a maintenance set in at the end.  

Also everyone thinks you are going to injure yourself from pulls ups if you havent master rows but that just is not true.  If you are already performing good controlled pull ups with relative ease then keeping them at the end of a session isnt going to hurt you.  just dont go nuts and over-do it or get sloppy with the reps trying to pump out more than you are really capable.... that is what will cause an injury.

5 hours ago, Andrew Long said:

If you like pulls ups and can do them controlled with decent form then coach has consistently recommended putting a maintenance   set of anything like that at the end of a workout.  I personally lost a lot of my pull up ability while working through rows etc. and wish I had kept a maintenance set in at the end.  

Also everyone thinks you are going to injure yourself from pulls ups if you havent master rows but that just is not true.  If you are already performing good controlled pull ups with relative ease then keeping them at the end of a session isnt going to hurt you.  just dont go nuts and over-do it or get sloppy with the reps trying to pump out more than you are really capable.... that is what will cause an injury.

I agree and after this I'm not really going to comment on this any more. My opinion varies a little from the coaches here on a few things and that's not going to change. You're paying them to be here and not me... so unless you know your body well and have years of experience then listen to them.

I've done thousands of pull ups over the years and I'm not going to stop now... But, I think I mentioned somewhere in this forum before I had elbow tendonitis last year... and pushed it to the point where I had to back away completely from pulling movements for a few months... but with this type of training and all the other stuff I do I still had tons of things to choose from so I wasn't deprived of exercise.

But I didn't run into my issues because my joints were weak... I had issues because I over trained and got stupid. I was simultaneously doing weighted rope climbs, weighted pullups, one arm pull up work, straight arm work, certain hand work like card tearing the stresses the tendons up to the elbow, flag work, etc..... and weighing about 210 pounds at 6'1" just adds to the stress. So in short I was doing too much  and doing it too often and ignored when I felt the signs that I was hurting myself. I was making gains on everything and didn't want to back off... until I was forced to...

So regardless of where you are... F1 or even F4.... LISTEN to your body. That is the most important thing. NOONE is immune to injury regardless of how prepared you are... Do you watch the Olympics? How many gymnasts are wearing braces on some part of their body? Many of them.... and they have the best coaches on the planet. But they also push themselves to limits most people will never dream of.

So if you can do strict pullups then chances are you have nothing to worry about... especially if you aren't pushing yourself to the extremes... as in loaded pulling or going to failure.
If you can max out at 20 pullups then doing sets of 8-10 with good form should in no way hurt you.

So whatever you choose just be careful and know when to back away.

2 hours ago, Andy Desak 36466 said:

so unless you know your body well and have years of experience then listen to them.

Hi Andy

I think you have made some good point on this topic

I definitely have years of experience unfortunately it's in how not to do things. Like said i'm my first post on this forum I was the most immature athlete possible at 37.