How to Do a Negative Pull Up Exercise

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Smith with Expert Village and right now we're going to go over negative only pull ups. So, we're going over just the eccentric or the negative portion of a pull up. This is made to build strength for regular pull ups if you can't do one yet. You're going to need something like a chair, here, that will get you up to the height of the bar so you don't have to do a pull up because these are typically for people who can't do pull ups. You get up, get your grip, and the goal here is to lower yourself as slowly as possible. Because you're typically stronger lowering yourself than raising yourself. Come up, get yourself into position, then lower yourself as slowly as possible to arms all the way straight. Then get back up, that was one rep, we get back up and we do another one. Get yourself in position, start letting yourself down slow to arm straight, again repeat. Now, remember we have different grips that we can do. You can mix them out in the same work-out or you can do all one work-out one way and do your next work-out a different way. Just use the different grips. I'm going to use an overhand pull up grip here, just let yourself down. Notice that we are not doing the up part, just the lowering. You can do this with added weight as you get stronger. The goal is to be able to do a pull up before you start adding weight to the negative though. Again, if you want to do commando pull ups which is this grip. You get up here, lower yourself down. As you get tired you'll find an area in that range of motion where you'll run out of juice and you'll tend to just flop. You should stop around that point. Don't go much further than that point, there's no point in just free-falling down from the bar. Those are dead hang negative only pull ups where you only do the lowering, also known as the eccentric or the negative portion of a pull up, to build strength for regular pull ups."