Traptastic Pull Ups, Rest Duration & Foundations For Success

Traptasic Pull Ups! In my opinion, it’s more important to engage the right muscles than to simply satisfy arbitrary standards. So when you do a pull up, are you aware of what you are doing and what you are engaging, or are you just throwing your chin over the bar? Are you using your lats? Traps? Serratus? Are you braced through your TVA, or are you using your 4 pack? Are you breathing through the movement or are you holding it in? It’s a small change, but simply injecting some awareness into your training can go a long way... Consciously thinking about how you are moving will lead to improved performance… Pain-free performance, too… Your traps shouldn’t be doing pull ups - they WILL bite you eventually…  How Long Should I Rest Between Sets? (With the goal of getting strong) The length of your rest between sets: - allows the central nervous system to recover - affect which hormones will be secreted, and to what extent - regulates the restoration of the short term energy substrates - allows for clearance of metabolic waste

- lowers the elevated heart rate, etc… As a guide, 3-5 minutes when training heavy loads (85% +) in the compound lifts. You want to allow the nervous system to recover almost completely, but you don’t want to wait so long that you lose the post-tetanic potentiation effect (where you can lift more after a heavy effort due to increased neural activation). If you’re world class and there’s money and medals on the line, the rest period is clearly an important variable and it’s well worth dialing in on. If you’re not that guy, then I probably wouldn’t stress too much about it - just enjoy yourself. Foundations For Success As annoying as it sounds, the basics are your foundation for success. So for you reading this, think things like breathing and bracing. Get good at them, then get better at them, then keep practicing some more. You won’t find any high performer without good basics in their field. Many of you know the oblique opener; how many actually do it? I’ve been practicing it for a while and I’m still finding areas I can improve on…The depth of it continues to amaze me, and the practice continues to enhance my life. Knowing about stuff isn’t enough... You won’t get the improvements without the action… Without doing… You don’t get high performance without continually working on the basics - doing, reviewing, mastering… And the deeper you go, the more amazing things become…