 Welcome back to the school of calisthenics with Tim and Jaco and today's lesson is for everyone out there that are finding pull-ups tough. Now this pull-up is a stable part of any calisthenics training program and it's really important that we get these nailed down if we're going to move on to more advanced progressions within bodyweight training such as human flags, muscle ups and other exciting stuff like that. But we know that as a beginner trying to nail down your first set of one or five pull-ups can be really difficult and there's really useful parts of any well-rounded program like active hang holds that we'll do to stabilize the shoulder blades and create some good pulling foundations and anchor to pull against. We'll use horizontal rows to just to put some capacity in there and get some more basic raw pulling strength in the locker as well and then the more specific things like eccentric and isometrics which are just going to really start to help us to create higher tension and create more force within the muscle and that's going to help with the strength gains but there's one piece within all that that we're missing a little bit of and that is vertical pulling strength so actually making sure that all of that foundation work that we do with the active hangs with the eccentric that we're able to pull with the shoulder in a good position on those bodyweight rows but we need to actually get over the fact that gravity is pulling us down and we need some vertical pulling strength to get ourselves up and so we need some ways to scale that and that's what we've got for you today. We're going to show you then two assisted variations to help us with this vertical pulling one with we're going to show you is we're going to be the rings the other is going to be with the bar but you can mix and match these where the ring or bar that's totally up to you. The important part is we're starting to get the lower body involved to help us move through that vertical pulling pattern more effectively and just using a little bit of support from the feet and the lower body is going to just take a little bit of weight off it means we can get the synchronization of pulling pattern nailed down but you don't have the full intensity of having all of your bodyweight hanging from the bar or the rings it's a great little progression to get those reps in the bank. Let's get started on the ring. This is the lower body assisted pull-up and we're just going to get started with our feet on the floor using the rings set at a height which is going to allow you to get your bum to the floor with the arms straight. Now the principle and the coaching points for this are exactly the same as a full pull-up we have to think about making strong stable foundations from the shoulders so even though we're sat on the floor we're still going to move into an active hang position so you can see Jaco there just moves his shoulders down away from the ears and then he pulls himself up between the rings. The feet on the floor are going to provide a little bit of support and you can push down through the ground as much or as little as you need to. The more difficult you want to make it push a little bit less even take one foot off the floor to make it more difficult and you're going to place more and more demand on the upper body. The key thing to remember though is to make sure you're moving vertically. If we're going to get great transfer ever into pull-up what we don't want to do is end up sliding backwards and turning it into a horizontal row that's a separate exercise that has got value but the whole point of this one is to get the body moving up head going up between the rings and starting to create stable foundations some basic strength and get reps in the bank which are going to help us to transfer it up onto the high bar. This is the assisted pike pull-up where just like it we use pike push-ups to go from being good at pushing horizontally in a normal push-up to trying to get more vertical we use the pike variation. We're going to do the same thing here we're using Tim's using the bar as an example you could set up the rings in the same position but what we're going to do now is rather than have the bum support on the floor the start position he's cleared the floor at the start so make sure the height of where your hands are gives you that space feet go on the box and he's in this piked position he then his assistance comes from pushing down through the heels but he does exactly the same pulling mechanics so setting the active hang position so shoulder blades come down and they're engaged and retracted and then drives elbows down to the side so that chin goes up against the bar some things you can think about to make sure he keeps the shoulder in good position driving the elbows down towards the sides rather than letting him flare out it's going to keep him into good shape and then the same as we have done before with some of the examples the least amount of effort he puts through pushing into his legs the harder he's going to make it so he can do one leg and if he is going to do one leg variations make sure you swap each time so you're not loading up one side and that's a nice way for him to be able to get used to pulling himself up vertically getting over the use of fighting gravity to get yourself in those good pulling mechanics with the concentric strength build up your capacity for those you're going to have your first pull-up in no time so give those two exercises a try let us know how you get on whether you're working on your first ever pull-up or you can just do one or two and you want to build up some of that more capacity that's going to help unlock some of those bigger moves further down the line in your callister next journey we'd love to hear from you and keep us updated with your progress on them these two exercises are part of a wider pull-up program that you're going to need to put in place if you're going to start to conquer this foundation move and enjoy more advanced progressions in the future and if you want some more support with that we have full pull-up program and our beginners classroom with a virtual classroom have fun head over to school of calisthenics.com and you're going to find all the details there to find out more about the virtual classroom and if you wanted to learn your basics for your foundation movements for your calisthenics training or you want some more advanced stuff in terms of learning to handstand human flag or muscle up it's all there for your prescriptive training programs exercise tutorials and videos what else could you need everything that they need and i'm even going to put it up there for you click on to the website and you can go and dive in and see you inside the virtual classroom see you next time class dismiss