I got stuck on pull ups. Even after over a year and change, I can’t seem to do more than eight at a time. That’s a lot better than the three I used to be able to do, but I figure I can do more; not for the sake of higher numbers, but because I know I can get stronger.

There are many ways to work yourself off a plateau. One way is to keep working at it harder. The way I decided to take was to go all engineer on the problem, take it apart, and try and rebuild it.

Return to the basics

In martial arts training, you never get away from the basics. It doesn’t matter how many advanced techniques you learn; the basics are always there. Similarly in weight lifting, the motions are always the same; it doesn’t matter if you’re lifting the bar or three times your weight in iron.

In progressive calisthenics though, more advanced versions of the same exercise can be quite different; the same basic principles apply to each ‘family’ of exercises, but there are significant changes in form as the intensity increases. The reason for my hitting a limit is, I think, having abandoned some of those basic principles as the form changed.

Earlier this year, I cut full pull ups out of my routine entirely and went back to the most basic pulling motion I could do; a vertical pull from near standing, holding onto a stick in the doorway. This exercise does not require a lot of strength, and it gets dull after a while.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for such a low intensity exercise; it gives you the opportunity to focus on the details, in a way you can’t if you’re going pedal to the metal. The several thousand repetitions I did over January and February let me notice and correct several details; the focus of the pulling action, breathing pattern, abdominal tension, and so on.

Eventually, I started to concentrate on turning those changes into habit. Unlike my first time around, I wasn’t keeping an eye on how many repetitions I could do; only that I could do them exactly as I wanted for as long as I could.

Make haste slowly

While Convict Conditioning has some great guidelines on progress – the worked great for me on most exercises – this time around I followed a different tack. Rather than paying attention to the listed progression with a minimum goal for advancement, I followed the idea of milking a specific exercise to its extreme.

The idea is to keep doing the same exercise until you’ve gotten absolutely everything you could possibly get from it. Then you make the smallest change possible, and go again. This isn’t a ten step programme – the minor adjustments are infinite.

Once the vertical pulls started to feel effortless in sets of 50, I replaced the stick with a tension strap and started to deepen the angle slowly. My plan from here is to continue to increase the depth until I end up lying down on the floor in the start position, and then change the exercise.

There’s no kill like overkill!

Is this the most efficient way to progress? Probably not; skipping a ton of the smaller changes would probably get me the same results much faster, as would switching exercises sooner.

Still, I have no problem with that; I find this kind of experimentation interesting, and I’m in no rush – I’ll be doing some milestone tests in April and August to see if there’s any improvement, but for now I’m perfectly happy just inching along.

What about you?

Are there any plateaus you’ve hit, or broken through? Do you have any strategies for dealing with them? Drop me a line, I’d love to hear all about them!