Pull Up Station – No Gym Needed
A Pull Up Station – NEVER Need the Gym Again!
If you’re like me, you hate the gym. It’s always crowded when you want (or have time) to go. This means not only are you having to elbow your way through people, but wait on that one guy using the only piece of equipment you want to use. If you’re lucky, he leaves it all sweaty and nasty for you when he’s done. Yuck.
While you’re waiting on Mr. Sweaty, you have some trainer up your hind end trying to tell you everything you’re doing wrong. Problem is that this guy probably doesn’t have much experience actually training people beyond some correspondence school home-study course. (Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?) Besides, you know he’s just trying to get you to spend money on personal training sessions anyway.
Then there’s the drive there, dealing with changing clothes, that funky old dude in the locker room who walks around in his underwear…gyms just are no fun.
You can get a great workout at home, and accomplish all the same things you can in a gym with just a cheap set of adjustable dumbbells or even just regular bodyweight calisthenics like you used to do in high school P.E. class. But none of these exercises target upper body pulling – the muscles of the back part of your upper body.
That’s where a Pull Up Station comes in.
Why Do You Need a Pull Up Station?
Now, you might be wondering why you would need a Pull Up Station in the first place? Is a Pull Up Station really necessary to get a complete workout at home?
The answer really is ‘yes’.
See, for the most part, there are three main types of exercises:
- Upper Body Pushing
- Upper Body Pulling
- Lower Body
What sort of exercises you can do from these categories will depend on what sort of equipment you have at home. Let’s say you just have a set of adjustable dumbbell handles with weight plates to put on them. These are highly versatile, very inexpensive, and totally portable. (Really, there is no reason why somebody who doesn’t want to train at a gym shouldn’t own a pair…my own personal workouts use adjustable dumbbell handles a large portion of the time.)
Between adjustable dumbbells and bodyweight exercises, you can target two of those three categories pretty well. You can hit Upper Body Pushing by doing overhead shoulder presses and various styles of pushups. This will target the shoulders, chest, and triceps very effectively. You can target your entire Lower Body with various squats, lunges, step-ups, and more. All of these can be done either un-weighted or holding dumbbells in each hand.
But, if you want to effectively do Upper Body Pulling exercises (and work the muscles of the back and biceps to their full potential), then a Pull Up Station is essential. You will need a place to do pull ups, chins, and all their variations.
How a Pull Up Station Fixes the “Mirror Problem”
Pullups, chins, and other exercises that can be done at a Pull Up Station are often overlooked by trainees for one specific reason – they don’t see those muscles in the mirror.
If you stop to think about it, take a look at the exercises you see many people doing in gyms. What do they all have in common? They all work muscles on the front side of the body (chest, biceps, abs, etc). Why is this?
Because these are the muscles they see when they look in the mirror. They don’t even stop to think about the muscles they *don’t* see in the mirror – the ones of the back…the exact ones you’ll target when you use a Pull Up Station:
- Lats – the muscles on the ‘outside’ of the back (the ones that give you that “V-taper” look)
- Rhomboids – the muscles of middle and back that protect your spine
- Trapezius – the muscles that connect the shoulder girdle, upper back, and neck
This is literally the entire back half of your upper body…to not mention how a Pull Up Station will work your biceps, grip, forearms, and more.
Something else to think about – if you do too many ‘pushing’ exercises (shoulder presses, pushups, etc), you create muscle imbalances through your shoulder girdle because you’re doing a lot more ‘pushing’ than you are ‘pulling’. Using a Pull Up Station effectively negates and prevents these imbalances.
You prevent shoulder injury, maintain shoulder girdle integrity, and keep your shoulders healthy overall by regularly using a Pull Up Station.
Is a Pull Up Station Better Than a Machine?
Some people want to know why they need to use a Pull Up Station in the first place. After all, if they were to keep going to a gym, couldn’t they just use the cable machines that simulate a pull up? Isn’t this just as effective as using a Pull Up Station? After all, the movement is the same, right?
Not necessarily.
There has been some research into the concept of “NMA” – neuromuscular activation and which exercises are most beneficial as a result of increased NMA.
Without getting to “science-ey”, it goes like this – all types of exercises were put on a sort of continuum. On one end, you had machines that locked you into a set range of motion and movement pattern. You climb into the machine, and just move how it lets you move.
On the other end, you have bodyweight movements where you actually move your body through space (be they just normal calisthenics or if you have external weight added).
In the end, the research found that given the same resistance, bodyweight movements actually taxed the muscles more, and trainees got MUCH better results. In other words, say you were using a cable machine, simulating what you’d do in a Pull Up Station. When compared to exerting the same effort in a Pull Up Station, you wouldn’t get nearly the same results – the exercises performed in a Pull Up Station win every single time!
Your best bet really is to get yourself a Pull Up Station, and do your upper body pulling exercises on it.