The Parisi Two-Minute Drill: The 5 P’s To Pull-Ups

The Parisi Two-Minute Drill: The 5 P’s To Pull-Ups

The Play: Pull-Ups

The Purpose: To work on the posterior chain and lats. This will give you increased shoulder extension, allowing you to better counter balance yourself when sprinting.

Pre-Snap Read: It is important to make sure your shoulders are positioned correctly. You want to retract your shoulders; meaning that they are positioned shrugged down and relaxed. This will give you more movement with your lats and less with shoulder blade, allowing you to maximize performance.

Performance: Get underneath the bar, extend your arms up and grab the bar with your palms facing upwards (supinated position). Then do what the name of the exercise is… pull up. Make sure you are firing your lats to pull yourself up. If you are struggling to pull yourself up and over the bar, try getting some assistance from a partner holding your feet or utilize and elastic band that you can stand on that stretches across the bottom of the rack. This will provide you with a little bit of bounce when you start your pull-up.

If you are unable to do a pull-up, with or without assistance, a good way to start is by doing a couple of negative chins. What you do here is grab onto the bar and jump up a bit to get your chin over the bar. Then hold. Next you want to slowly bring yourself down to the standard pull-up start position. Do a couple of reps when you start out, so you don’t get too sore. After a couple of weeks, try the pull-up again, with or without assistance.

Post-Drill Analysis: Were your shoulders retracted? When doing the pull-up, did you feel it in your lats? Lastly, don’t feel discouraged if you can’t do a pull-up. The average pull-up for a male athlete is one pull-up and for females, it is zero. However, if you start off slowly and work on them with the correct technique, I know you will start to see results.