Pull-Up Progression

Workout 1 - tailored for those with minimal pulling strength, this basic pull workout will help you build sufficient strength and muscle mass for the pull-ups. Just make sure your technique is geared towards biasing the lats more than the traps - tucked elbows and pull until the side of the lats, not past it.

Workout 2 - this one is for those who can already handle their own very well on Australian Pull-Ups. When it comes to exercise selection, you might as well lean towards doing a chin up (supinated grip) first since it is generally easier than the pronated grip pull-up with the additional engagement of biceps and pecs.

Workout 3 - as you can see with the exercise selection, this is for those who have access to a gym or lat pulldown and rowing machines. Since they are of similar movement patterns and pretty much the same in terms of muscle engagement, they will greatly help you achieve your first pull-up with the additional benefits of easier intensity manipulation. You can even do so with only lat pulldowns, especially if you're not heavier than the whole lat pulldown weight stack.

To properly warm up for the pull-up, you simply need to warm up the muscles around the scapula, shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints by moving them around with intent or doing some named mobility movements. Then, do some warm-up sets for the main exercise. For example:

Light Mobility Drill: Shoulder Circles -> Shoulder Corkscrews -> Elbow Circles -> Wrist Rotations for a round or two with enough reps for you to feel them working.

Warm-Up Set/s: You can either do a modified variation of your main exercise, like modifying your body positioning to make the exercise easier in the case of Australian Pull-Ups, or do an easier pulling exercise for some reps far from failure to use and warm up the same muscle groups.

Just make sure that whatever you do is just enough to work and warm up your muscles, not tire them, so you can perform your best in your working sets.

Depending on how strong you are currently, you can choose whatever pulling exercise you like as long as it uses the same muscle groups as the traditional pull-ups to a good degree with emphasis on the latissimus dorsi.

Alternatively, you can use free weights and machines, especially machines like lat pulldowns because you can easily adjust the intensity. In some cases, it may even be more efficient to do so compared to purely relying on bodyweight exercises. There won't be much issue in terms of muscle development since they pretty much use the same muscle groups.

You simply have to choose or modify an exercise for you to be able to do that within the specified rep range to build both strength and muscle mass on the main muscle groups involved.

Determine what your limiting factors are in your pull-up training, then choose exercises for those. These typically include shoulder mobility, scapular depression (the primary scapular limiter in pulling movements), grip and forearm strength, and other lagging muscle groups.

The template recommends 2 to 4 sets for the main exercise. Leaning toward the higher end — 3 to 4 sets — tends to be more beneficial if you are relatively new to training. Research shows that less-trained individuals voluntarily activate a smaller percentage of their available motor unit pool — even at maximal effort — leaving more motor units unstimulated per set.

Additional sets provide more high-effort recruitment opportunities before fatigue accumulates and begins limiting motor unit recruitment. As neural efficiency improves with training, each set becomes more effective at reaching higher-threshold motor units, and 2 to 3 sets may be sufficient.

This is a strength-specific progression where training frequency matters — more sessions mean more neural practice opportunities. Keeping each session manageable enough to recover fully before the next one is what sustains that frequency. While 1–2 RIR is generally better for this reason, it's still useful to go to task failure (0 RIR) early on when you don't yet have a feel for what near-failure is, to avoid undertraining.

With this, you should compensate for it by ensuring other training variables are optimized for recovery, like nutrition, sleep, stress management, and overall training volume. But then, after getting the hang of the feeling of going until failure, it's better to stay in 1 - 2 RIR and use going until failure sparingly.

For strength progressions like this, a relatively high training frequency is beneficial — more sessions mean more practice opportunities, which primarily drives the neural and motor pattern adaptations behind skill-based strength gains. Fatigue is an unavoidable byproduct of training, so the goal is to keep each session's effort manageable enough to recover fully before the next one. Every other day or 2–3 times a week are both reasonable options, the latter providing a slightly longer recovery window between sessions.

Over time, you should notice an increase in strength, and your main pull-up exercise becomes easier. At this point, consider trying a more challenging variation of the pull-up progression you are currently doing. For example, if you've been working on Australian Pull-Ups and can already do it with 8 reps, experiment with adjusting your body positioning to be more horizontally aligned or with exercises like chin-ups or partial pull-ups. Stick with the new variation for some time, and repeat the process whenever you achieve increased strength.