Why pulling yourself up is important.

Why the pull up is an essential testimony to physical and mental strength.

There are certain exercises which reap ultimate benefits and are most conducive to muscular hypertrophy and strength gains. (In other words, they get you jacked.) Incidentally, I try not to neglect them, for fear of selling my results short in my training and getting a bigger bang for my buck. Think about the benefits of performing an explosive power clean in place of 3x12 ‘’shrugs’’. One hits your posterior chain intensely, developing your leg muscles, including the calves, glutes, and hamstrings, whilst also targeting the muscles in the lower and upper back and traps. The other can build or break depending on your posture, range of motion and dumbbell weight. I prefer to choose the exercises that give me the utmost results. You won’t see me on a chest press, ‘wrist curling’ or on any machine that requires a mechanical range of motion and very little core activation. I prefer compound exercises. 'They are exercises that engage two or more different joints to fully stimulate entire muscle groups and, indeed, multiple muscles'. These tried and tested movements are tried and tested for a reason, and they’re pretty badass too.

A full depth squat, where an athlete squats as low as possible; before driving their heels into the ground and ascending upwards with (relatively) heavy weight on their back. A full range of motion push up, where one assumes the push up position with elbows locked and hands centered about shoulder width apart on the ground before pushing back up.  I like these movements. They feel natural to the body, unlike the mechanic movement progressions found on the pec dec and smith machine. Incidentally, because the body is going through the full range of motion with proper form and weight, they happen to be the exercises that support muscle growth, time and time again. Of all the excercises I would choose, pullups would place somewhere in the top three. No exercise has given me a greater sense of achievement than successfully completing a full range of motion pull-up. targeting all of the major 'pull' muscles in your body, 'the back, biceps and forearms, pull ups are a must if functional strength is a desire; and it always should be.

 It’s what’s contributed to my own pull strength and has supported strength gains in my deadlift, overhead press and bench press. The pull up targets every muscle in your back. As a rule of thumb, if I am ever trying to put on weight, I not only allow the mirror to be my guiding point for when to halt my caloric intake, but also allow my ability to perform a pullup to guide me. If I have gained weight, yet can no longer perform ten to twelve pullups, something is wrong and my strength gains are likely stalling. People might call me crazy, but a pullup has always had so much symbolic value for me. Pulling one’s own weight up with your arms and back is a true testimony to functional strength. The pullup says, ‘I can carry this’. No matter how hard things get, if you can still do a pullup, you’re still strong. I sometimes imagine that life can be as daunting as hanging from a cliff, and the only option you have is to pull yourself up or fall to death. Everytime I perform a pull up, I feel like I am making a step in the positive direction, becoming a stronger and better version of myself. 

 Be like Travis Bickle

I first fell in love with the pull-up after watching Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) for the first time. Travis Bickle’s desire to redefine his identity, gain strength and get back in shape after late nights in the cab inspired me. ‘’June twenty-ninth. I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be 50 push ups each morning, 50 pullups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.’’ Travis progressed from being weak and gaunt to building some functional strength and consequently, muscle. Appearance is a consequence of fitness. It is never the other way around. If you can perform 50 pull-ups, say for 5x10, there’s no way you won’t be on the road to getting jacked. Of course, this won’t happen over night. Most will struggle to perform one pull up, let alone ten. But those same people will get as much, if not more personal satisfaction, from performing one pull up for the first time then ten.However, slowly but surely, you will get there. Whether you perform it in one set of ten or ten sets of one, it’s still ten pull-ups.

Performing the pull up

Grab a bar which will support your weight with your hands slightly wider than shoulder width apart. Your hands should be facing away from you (that's a pullup). Hanging all the way down from the bar, breathe in and while bracing your core,  exhale while pulling yourself up until your chin is above the bar. Lower yourself back down before pulling up again, concentrating on engaging your back, core and biceps.

SCALEABLE

 Easy for you to say Sam, you don't have a life and presumably spend hours in a playground, swinging off the jungle gym. I can't even do one pull up!

True as that may be, if you can't do a pull-up you're not alone. When I was underweight and trying to overcome anorexia, I couldn't even perform half a pull up!

Fortunately, there is a variation for every level of Athlete.

Can’t do an overhand pullup? No problem! Chin ups are easier. Grab the bar with your palms facing towards you an pull yourself up, placing more emphasis on your biceps. Can’t do either? Inverted rows are your starting block. It doesn't matter where you are on the pullup scale. Whether you can do 1 or 10, the important thing is that you progress. For some, that's going to mean performing pullups weighted with a 20 kg vest. For others, that first unassisted pullup is the golden prize.


FUNCTIONAL

You’ll see most guys who can bench 225 lbs, yet can barely perform one full range of motion pull-up. What’s the point of pushing all that weight with questionable form if you literally can’t pull yourself up? If you’re not including the pull-up in your arsenal of exercises, you’re selling yourself short. This is particularly poignant given all of the benefits you can reap. Pull-ups (and the shoulder press) are for the upper body what squats are to the lower. They are a compound exercise which trigger a release of growth hormones while targeting your back, biceps and core. In other words, pull-ups = gains maximus. Every man wants that V-taper, and pull-ups are essential in achieving that desired physique.

CONVENIENT

 Pull-ups can be performed anywhere. If you have access to a playground, you can do pull-ups. No playground? Find a tree. They are too convenient and require no fancy equipment. When I first started to workout in Beijing, all I had access to was a pull up bar in the garden that the locals would use. Performing just pushups and pull-ups, I made significant upper body gains. Now that I have access to a gym, they are still one of my number one go to exercises for the upper body. 

There you have it, now that you know, you know. Do not take this as an instructional fitness article. My thoughts on pull ups cannot replace the value of an intelligent training routine by a professional trainer. I am just an everyman who enjoys staying active and strength training, I felt a desire to write an article on my appreciation of the pull-up. I need a new hobby. Stay safe!

-Sam

References:

http://www.allmaxnutrition.com/post-articles/training/back-to-basics-the-5-best-compound-movements-for-maximum-gains/

https://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/04/25/do-a-pull-up/

(b)eating disorder

I lace up my asics, noticing how worn, overused and reaking of sweat they are. My body resembles much of the same, yet I'm far more oblivious of that than I am of the asics. It's Saturday evening in June and as school is finishing up, boys-now men- are untieng the laces that the last six years had held on them. School was over, life was just beginning. Most are conclude their education by having a final blow out, saying their goodbyes and simply thanking God that it's all over. Either way, someone is doing something. But not me. I'm running. I don't even know why at this point. I'm eight stone, 119 lbs and unlikely to get any thinner, but I know what will happen if I don't. I'll be anxious, I'll be uneasy and I'll shame myself for not continuing in this race I've started with myself. You think you're winning. You think you're in control. But you're really killing yourself, stride by stride, on an evening in July. Now days, I try to remember who I was, but it seems so distant, and so unreal to me. I don't really remember who I was, and although my friends might have recalled some tangible difference, they may as easily recall that they don't. For all that was external about my eating disorder, more of it was internal. I'm just one or two steps ahead of who I was, and one or two steps away from it. And if I sat down with Sam four year ago, all I could probably utter is 'why?' I don't think I'd get an answer, either.

Remember when we were young enough to have sleepovers? I do. In one particular instance, a friend had commented on my torso when I was changing my shirt. ''You have boobs!'' The sentence  came out as a joke but hung in the air, and for the first time in my life I questioned my physical appearance. How is that we go from unconscientious babies, with no self concerns other than needing to eat and poop, to being self aware adolescents, questioning ourselves as putting our bodies on trial. You don't inherit self-hate. You aren't born with low self-esteem. You don't come out of the womb regretting what you were made of. At one point or another, I looked in my bathroom mirror, eye'd myself up and down and asked, 'what is wrong with me.' Looking back, now I laugh. Most adolescent boys, up to 70%, experience the development of breast tissue during puberty. Yet a simple comment, or slag about my own appearance, shook my world. The next day I ran. I didn't know how far to run or what I was even looking for, but I ran. I was 16 and hellbent on changing who I was.

I grew up without a dad around, and as such I never had a male role model. I looked around to other guys for example, but never felt like I was the same as they were. They were in better shape. They were stronger, faster and incidentally seemed to be more in control. My family didn't live on much and we endured some pretty challenging domestic conflict. So I guess, in one way, I was trying to control my life by running away from it. I started to count calories, run five miles a day and avoid social situations that involved unhealthy food and drink. The more I ran, the more my body begun to thin out, but I never saw it. In fact, I only thought I was getting 'fatter'. So I ran more. I dieted harder. If I went to a party on a Saturday night, I would punish myself the next day by skipping breakfast and lunch and running ten miles that night. My knees are still thanking me. And it's funny. I still never thought I had a problem. I had convinced myself that as long as I wasn't sticking my head down a toilet, I didn't have a problem. When I eventually began to do that, I told myself that it could have been a lot worse, I could not be eating at all. As my dissatisfaction with my own body increased, I binged harder, puked more, and ran longer. The irony of all of this is that I never thought I had a problem. I thought that if I ever had a problem, I'd know it. I was merely controlling variables to reach a 'better' weight. My skin got dry, my bones were brittle and my testosterone dropped. Depression, anxiety, you name it. I got it all and I thought I never had a problem. I have spent more time than I'd like with my head down a toilet, and you'd think with all that time you'd get to know yourself pretty well down there, but I never did.

Life has a funny way of sending you in situations you would never see as a benefit, but in the long run, it all fits into its pieces. I injured myself from excessive long distance running (who'd have thought) and couldn't run for six months! At the time I never thought I  could survive such a long stretch without running, but the absence of it actually forced me to find a new outlet.  I moved to China, thinking I could atleast escape home for sometime. And go figure, I didn't last very long before trying to run again, only relapsing into injury and frustration. I was still binging. I was still getting sick, but I was equally getting fed up. I was tired of the routine. I can still recall breaking down in the garden in front of my apartment in the middle of the night. I was frustrated and sick of the unhealthy routine I had subjected myself to. I no longer wanted to miss out on life. I was thousands of miles away from home with every possibility in my hand, yet I felt trapped.  That's when I realised I had a problem. I couldn't enjoy the foods of a new country without worrying about my weight. Not knowing calories put me at unease. I realised a change was needed and that I needed to disassociate with running. After taking a safe amount of time away from excercise, I began to focus on getting stronger, rather than  losing weight. I couldn't do five pushups, let alone a pullup. But I begun none the less. I ate more, worried less and lived more. I actually began to become happy with myself, regardless of how I looked.
To my surprise, a few weeks later, I began to put on weight! My body was naturally adapting to weighted resistance (strength training) by building muscular tissue. That I could gain weight and not be upset blew my mind. Three years later, I'm healthier than I've been. Sure, I still struggle with soe issues, but I'm a thousand miles ahead of where I've been.

Looking back, one of the main reasons I never sought help was because I was ashamed to admit that I as a male had an eating disorder. As an illness traditionally associated with females, having an eating disorder was a distinct insult, if not contradiction to my sense of masculinity. Guys had guy problems. Girls has girl problems. If you google eating disorders, you will find clinical definitions that identify EDs as prevalent amongst young women. While this might be true, how much of that is changing is undiagnosed, due to the silence of men struggling with E.Ds, shamed by their environment. We paint pictures of men who are muscular, ripped, jacked, call it what you will, and expect men to meet those standards. At the same time we call them to be silent in suffering. We build the idea that our body reflects our worth, and destroy them for a sense of peace we never get. Men are committing suicide. Men are suffering from a lack of confidence, a lack of purpose and are all the while shamed for what they're not. Men are less likely to seek treatment for eating disorders because of the perception that they are “woman’s diseases. For what it's worth, the moment I began to make peace with what I saw in the mirror, the more I began to accept myself. Having a close support group was crucial and I owe much of my recovery to some friends I won't forget. Suffering in silence is a massive misconception. There are more men struggling with societal expectations than you would think, and we're all body conscious from to time. Feelings those emotions are okay; but what you do with them is key. If you'd like to lose some weight, first learn to disassociate  your body from YOU. You are not your body, and your self worth is not measured by it. The only body you'll ever have is the one you're wearing right now. You can lose weight, you can get muscular, but you cannot change what's on the inside by sculpting the outer appearance.
“No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside.”  

The process of writing is a spiritual and mental process. We write with the heart first and edit with the mind second. I thought that this article couldn't reflect much. It's the same shit as everyone else's, but it's my shit none the less. The very worst of those fears is making myself venerable. But without vulnerability, how can anyone ever have a real conversation? If you ask me how I am, and I respond by saying grand, that's all you'll say back. But I open up and tell you how I really am, the odds are you'll probably do the same. So let's start the conversation. Let's make the change. I hope atleast one person finds comfort in reading this. If you are struggling, you can send me a message, or call bodywhys helpline at 1890 200 444.
Saving this from becoming an allegory of who I was, or worse, a self pitying lament, I'll say that now I'm too busy being who I am to regret who I was.  And to be honest, if I had one thing I could say to my former self, it wouldn't be ''why'', it would be ''it's not your fault.'' As I write this, I'm preparing to throw on some Adidas sneakers and go the gym. In many ways, they remind me of the asics. Sure, they're worn and a bit beat up. But they're about all that are, and my body jumps with excitement as I tie the laces.



References

http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/

Sungot-Borgen, J. Torstveit, M.K. (2004) Prevalence of ED in Elite Athletes is Higher than in the General Population. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 14(1), 25-32.

Weltzin, T. Carlson, T., et al. (2014) “Treatment Issues and Outcomes for Males with Eating Disorders” in Cohn, Lemberg.

We might be in the gutter, but some of us are Chinese bamboo trees.

What if I told you that you're not your followers. 

You're not your facebook likes. You're not your 'goals' and you are most definitely not your Instagram account. Before all of that, we were just kids doing what kids do.We were dependent. We learned to walk by falling, we learned what foods we liked and the ones we didn't. We went to school on rainy days and learned in classrooms that smelled like damp jumpers. We learned how to speak Irish (an bhfuil cead agam dul go dti on leathras, anyone?) and we lined up in the playground at 11.15 for the all determining game of cops and robbers. Communion, cash. Confirmation, cash. Christmas? Yes please, Santa. We sat the junior cert, believing it to be the most important exam of our lives;and then we sat the Leaving Cert (believing it to be the most important exam in our lives).
And we learned that the world offered us an infinite amount of opportunities if we chose to believe that it did. We could be mammies and daddies, nurses and doctors or cops and robbers.

While innocent, I still recall instances of childhood where the realities of life seemed to creep into my little world of naivety. Wearing torn up shoes to school because my single mother couldn't afford to buy us new shoes, waiting on my father on Saturdays, only for him to never show up, and never understanding why I wasn't the same as other boys. Life's gaping head seemed to peer through whether we liked it or not, but we chose to ignore it, or failed to understand it. We clung to the idea that at one point or another, we could make something of ourselves, even a future that never seemed likely. Our generation has been raised to believe that anything is possible, if not that we should expect it to be. And perhaps we should; but what happens if our expectations are not met? What happens when a twenty something year old graduate looks in the mirror on some unsuspecting Monday, only to realize that life hasn't amounted to what he expected it to be. And what happens to the one who never had the opportunity to graduate in the first place?

The sad reality is that life brings challenges, and setbacks, and it is hard. Coupled with the fact that in this social media era, every time we sign online it seems like everyone is doing better than we are. But what if I told you that not everyone is a self-made entrepreneur, and that even my instagram reputation amounts to a feeble 87 followers (while some blonde taking selfies has scored a whopping 87 million). This blog is a voice for the beat down contender, not the pretender. Those who have real lives and real struggles. If you're reading this and you feel like you have been dealt an unfair pair of cards, bear with me, If you're reading this and you disagree with my 'pessimism', bear with me. Social media is deceiving. It;s where we have 2000 friends yet can barely count ten real ones on our own hands. It's where bodies are photoshopped and 11 year old girls(and boys) are made to feel insecure. And everyone's eating a salad for lunch, all the time. We create online personalities,  And as we fabricate our best self(ie), we lose a piece of what we were, My aim isn't to knock those who channel their energy and work into social media, but to say that if you base your identity upon it, your hopes and dreams begin and end there.

The consolation is that while it might seem like we are going nowhere, even nowhere is a start. And if you feel like you haven't met your expectations, it's because you just haven't arrived yet. You see, we the unfulfilled and overwhelmed are much like Chinese bamboo trees.What is profound about the Chinese bamboo tree is that it grows in a manner that is contrary to the growth pattern of normal trees. Where most trees grow over a linear period, the Chinese bamboo tree fails to grow for the first four years. However, what is remarkable is that on the fifth year, the Chinese bamboo tree grows an at exponential rate, growing up to 90 feet in five weeks! My growth spurt to a humble 5'9 pales in comparison. I can imagine the farmer's disappointment as he planted the tree, only to return for the first four summers to see little reward yielded. However, what he never saw was that the roots had been forming all along. In the same way, many of us feel a little lost. Today was the same as yesterday, and we fail to differentiate it from the future. We feel stagnant, like a dormant volcano waiting to erupt. You might feel this in your career, if you're working in a job that is unfulfilling (My hat goes off to you. Nobody works a job they dislike unless they have real priorities like providing for a family). You might feel like this in the gym if your deadlift has stalled and your bodyfat is not decreasing. And you might feel like the imagination you once had has been locked away in that damp smelling primary school room, waiting for a rainy day.  But rest assured, you growing. You might not feel it, and you might not see it today or tomorrow, but your roots are forming. This hurt; this lack of purpose? It will all make sense one day. I'm not telling you to become a self-entrepreneur and I'm not telling you to quit your job and your responsibilities. But I am telling you to hang on. The majority of us are like the disappointed farmer, waiting for the bamboo tree to bloom. But how worth it will it be? We might not grow ninety feet tall,but I guarantee you,when your tree grows, it will grow extraordinarily.

Turn off that smartphone, or atleast unfollow that 'inspirational' blogger who's doing more to bring you down than build you up. Don't feel guilty for not having arrived to where you want to be. Most of the successful bloggers you see online haven't arrived at where they want to be either. No Marilyn Monroe quote is going to bring you fulfillment, no matter how many times you share it on facebook. And Oscar Wilde won't save us either. ''We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'' True, some of us are in the gutter, but some of us are Chinese bamboo trees.