Here’s a tricky question for you. In which instance are you doing more physical work?
1. When you perform 10 conventional pull ups *, or
2. When you perform 10 unconventional, leg assisted pull ups in which you’re allowed to keep your feet flat on the floor while your legs help you move your body up and down through the pull up range of motion on the bar?
The answer of course is that you’re doing precisely the SAME amount of physical work, moving the same exact weight through the same exact distance in both instances. Now the difficulty of doing that amount of work using only your arms in the conventional edition is much greater, because you’re eliminating the leg assistance. And by adding your legs back into the equation the exercise becomes much easier. But in both cases though, the amount of physical work being performed is exactly the same.
With that said, why would anyone want to consider doing leg assisted pull ups instead of conventional pull ups? There are several good reasons. For starters the highest percentage of people these days are unable to do any conventional pull ups, so the leg assisted variety gives these folks a viable point where they can begin and foundation upon which they can build.
But even if you’re fully capable of performing conventional pull ups you may still want to consider using the leg assisted variety simply because you can do so much more physical work when your les are part of your recipe. In my own case for example, I can do 8 or 10 conventional pull ups in one set before I’m maxed out and I hit the fatigue wall. Then I have to rest for a minute or two before I do another set, etc.
But when I add in leg assistance I can perform 150 repetitions without stopping, at a pace of one rep per second. In other words I can do 5 to 15 times more physical work in the same amount of time or less, and that’s a very interesting trade off in my book.
Secondly, with conventional pull ups I get lots of great upper body pulling work and ZERO hips and legs work. But by adding legs to the mix, I not only get lots of great upper body pulling work, but I also get a ton of legs and hips work at the same time. In other words with leg assisted pull ups I get lots more bang for the time and effort I invest.
One additional thought is that the intensity of 150 leg assisted pull ups at a pace of one per second is so great that I also get a challenging cardio workout. In fact I dare anyone to do 150 leg assisted pull ups at one rep per second without being pretty exhausted when they’re done. It’s much more challenging than it sounds. And if you add leg assisted dips you’ll cover upper body pushing work in your routine as well. What a lethal and functional combination these two exercises are in my estimation.
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