What's up Jeff?
It's your boy, Lodell Parks coming to you from the Gateway to the West, St. Louis Missouri.
I've got one question.
As you can see my wide grip pullups and I start to fatigue, I lose my form.
I've tried weights to bring me down to 8 to 10 reps.
I've tried negatives, nothing seems to work.
When I get fatigued my shoulders will not let me stay under the bar.
Do I continue Pullups or do I stop and get ready for the next set, once I start to lose
my form.
I signed up with your program 5 years ago when I retired so I could get in shape and
enjoy my great grandkids.
I don't have any before pictures because I would not let anybody take them but I never
expected to look like this at 70.
Before!
After!
I love you man.
Hey Lodell.
Thank you for your question.
It's actually a very good question.
It's a common problem not just with pullups, but any time you have to hang from a bar.
A lot of it has to do with strength and stability and maybe not necessarily in the areas that
your thinking.
Your thinking, your shoulders but really it's more your back and your shoulder blades.
And specifically what is the stability and the strength in your lower traps or possibly
even your serratus,
to be able to keep your shoulder blades attached and in contact with your rib cage as you go
up and down.
What happens is, the fatigue starts to set in and you lose the ability to keep your shoulder
blades together and they start to drift out.
That allows you or causes you to start drifting away from the bar.
Because your shoulders just can't stay in that pinned back position as you go up and
down.
We want to be able to rotate our scapula up and down as we raise up but stay in contact
with our rib cage.
So there's a couple thing that you can start doing.
Number one, first of all too let's get a disclaimer out here.
A lot of times people can't steady themselves under a bar because their Core is not strong
enough.
I would say, check that first to make sure that you have adequate Core strength.
If you find that when you're swaying, you tighten your Abs you can immediately find
yourself much more steady,
then you might want to work on building up your Core strength by doing some hanging Ab
strengthening exercises.
But if we go back to the extra work that I was going to prescribe for you here,
you go to a Bench and you do what we call sort of a Stable Y.
The Stable Y it forces you to first stabilize and engage the lower traps by really pinching
your shoulder blades down and back together.
And then performing a Dumbbell Y.
Up and overhead.
You don't do any single rep unless you've first set and established the stability and
the contraction there between your shoulder blades before you do the move.
You would do this in a few extra sets, a few extra times per week to try to start developing
some additional strength.
Then before you even go back to the pullup bar, you go and you do this modified version
of a pullup.
We sort of focus on that upper half of the pullup, that part that's giving you the most
trouble.
You do that by setting the bar here, at about shoulder height and then positioning yourself
underneath
and what you're trying to do is keep your body going straight up and down.
Focus on driving straight up, your chin towards the bar without any of the swaying
but we do this by setting the shoulder blades back and down and maintaining that throughout.
Again it's a shorter range of motion so it's a little easier here for us, you don't have
to worry about as much sway
because you're simply right here, knees touching the ground at every single rep.
Now try to work on this and try to incorporate a little bit more strength here and you'll
increase the top end strength of your pullups.
But to answer your question about whether you need to ditch pullups altogether while
you're working on this?
Not at all, you're able to do at least 8, 9, 10 from what I could see here in this video
in great form so we're just talking about what happens as you fatigue.
Keep pushing through those, there's no disadvantage to you know, it's like a cheat method to allow
you to build a little bit more pullup strength
and not just drop off the bar the second it gets difficult for you but it's going to help
you build more shoulder stability as you continue here down the road.
So that you'll be able to do more correct pullups without the cheat, down the road.
I hope that makes a lot of sense here for you.
So all this together is what you really want to do.
And guys, there's a lot of cheats that our body uses to get ourselves around what we
do.
If you're looking for a way to start training your body the way it's meant to be trained.
And start becoming a lot more strong from your toes all the way to your fingertips.
Then guys, start training like an Athlete.
That's what we do here at ATHLEANX.
In the meantime, if you want your question answered just like Lodell, I tell you all
the time,
send your question, video question to MEDIARELATIONS@ATHLEANX.COM.
We'll put the email address right down here and we'll sort through them and
do our best to get to your question here on one of the 4 videos a week that we do on our
channel.
Alright guys I'll be back here again with another video very very soon.
See YA!.