Pendulum for Athletes & Pullups

Coach Thib

I have done both your Pendulum and “Keep your chin up” programs and both gave great results. I have reached a max of 30 pull ups (my goal 50) but since finishing the Pendulum program (3 cycles) my max has gone down to 25 (with difficulty might I add).

How can I incorporate the two programs? I was thinking of just adding Pull Ups throughout the Pendulum program and adding one week of just your pull up program. Is that too much? Does anyone else have any ideas?

My idea would be to increase your weight in the pull ups via a weighted belt. Work on a huge max! Why? Percentages. If I can bench 365 and you can bench 500 who is going to lift 225 more times? Me or you. You. The reason…225 is 45% of your max and more than 60% of my max. For you 225 is easy.

Say you weigh 200 lbs and you can do one pullup with 200 lbs attached you are doubling your weight. Now when you do un-weighted pullups you are doing less than 50% of your max.

I have not done any high rep exercises for quite some time. I have been training raw for quite a few years and my bench has sucked. I started training West Side a few months ago. I got my bench up to 365…don’t laugh hey man quit rolling on the ground compose yourself. Ok now that your done laughing, I’ll continue. A few months ago it was all I could do to finish a bench workout of 4X3 with 225. Two weeks ago I decided to try 225 for a rep max. I got 14 without a spotter. Two more than all the reps involved in a multiple set workout a few months ago.

mdragon

thanx for the reply. appreciate it. i’ll definitely try it on the next cycle of the Pendulum. so which westide program are you following? is it in t-mag? btw, congrats on your accomplishment.

I started with Westside for skinny bastards(T-mag article from Joe DeFranco.) Then started reading Westside stuff at Elitelfts.com I don’t claim to know a lot about it. I also tweek things to match my goals. I read a lot of Joe Defranco’s stuff and he takes a lot of training ideas from Westside.

[quote]msarmie wrote:
I have reached a max of 30 pull ups [quote]

I’ll leave the advising to those who can do that many pull-ups, but congratulations! That is a seriously impressive number.

[quote]mdragon wrote:
I got my bench up to 365 … A few months ago it was all I could do to finish a bench workout of 4X3 with 225. Two weeks ago I decided to try 225 for a rep max. I got 14 without a spotter. [/quote]

Dammit, I can barely get a touch and go with 345, and if I actually pause the bar, 320 is it. Yet I can rep 225 20 times. My fiber makeup sucks.

Congrats on the 365