Fitness: Get more out of your pull-ups with these 4 variations

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The pull-up is the ultimate closed-chain exercise in the gym for the upper body. One might master pushups and feel like they’ve hit a plateau, but the pull-up will remain as challenging as ever.

The exercise has enough variations, and you can always add more resistance to keep it challenging. It hits the most of the dominant back muscles, and the biceps and triceps, along with being an important foundation move to make core exercises like hanging leg-raises more doable. Once you learn how to cleanly pull yourself up the bar, it adds more personality to your workouts.

I wrote a story for Lounge three years ago, titled Five Great Pull-up Variations To Get Stronger. The piece included the commando pull-up, the chin-up, Australian pull-ups or inverted rows, and the explosive pull-up. Here are three more you must try to add to your arsenal.

Negative pull-ups: There is nothing ‘negative’ about this pull-up. The name is more to do with how the move is executed. Get a box and start the exercise in a position in which you usually end a traditional pull-up.

Which means you are already standing with the bar to your chest. Let go off the box support and suspend the body, slowly returning to a hanging position. So the starting position becomes the ending position and vice versa.

This is excellent for beginners given that the going up part is tougher than the coming down part in a pull-up. The key is to do it slowly, steadily, and with all the muscles engaged rather than just do a dead-hang. The L-sit pull-up: Adding an L-sit to your pull-up means your lats are already stretched before you start doing the move.