Sometimes in our workouts we want to challenge the athletes with a particular exercise, while at the same time getting increased volume in some of the simple exercises. Pull ups tend to fall into this category as with most of our female population, they are only able to knock out 1 or 2 unassisted pull ups on a good day. So in our normal competitive manner we set up a 10 minute workout where each girl partnered up creating 3-6 teams (pairs of 2 athletes). The goal was to score as many points as possible in 3 sets. Here was the scoring format…
- Unassisted Pull Ups = 5 points
- Band Assisted Pull Ups = 2 points
- TRX Suspended Inverted Row = 1 point
So one of our athletes, in her first set did 3 Unassisted Pull Ups (15 pts), 6 Assisted Pull Ups (12 pts) and 13 (TRX Suspended Inverted Rows (13 pts) for a grand total of 40 pts! Her total after 3 sets was 97 points. Some of our boys were scoring in the 120′s and one of our boys got to 140! This is a great way to work on strengthening posture and upper back strength with tons of body weight oriented volume in a competitive manner.
Here is a brief video of one of our groups last night. On point to make note of is that the were doing this AFTER they completed 2 sets of a 12 minute sprint conditioning interval test (24 minutes of walk, jog, run and sprint for both distance and speed!). So if you see some standing around, we were encouraging some recovery in this exercises as they were told to take their time.
