It starts with attitude and discipline. The discipline is going twice or three times a week to the bar and lifting yourself up as many times as you can in twenty minutes. The attitude is believing that you can do more, each time and believing that which you cannot believe.
What I mean by the last part is actually quite simple. When you are hanging from the bar and your arms are tired don’t let go, but lift up once more, and then once more. It’s an attitude and if you leave your expectations at the door before you approach the bar that attitude will drive you through to a level you never have been to before. Like Donkey Kong baby!
Basically, I just went two to three times a week, in fall, in winter and in spring outside and started the stopwatch and didn’t stop till 20 minutes. If it snowed, I went, if it rained I went, if it was freezing cold I went and did those damn pull-ups and drip by drip with each pull the total number steadily increased. I discovered that instead of taking long breaks and doing less reps I needed to minimize the time between reps and that drastically increased my total. So every two minutes, I got back on that bar and surprised myself by discovering that my muscles had more juice in them than my brain was telling me.
When I first reached 50 I was overjoyed, and thought that it was a great accomplishment. I thought wow, that seems to be the max, not sure I can do more than that. Then, one day I somehow got to 56, and thought ‘holy crap, that’s got to be it’. Then about a month ago I went out there and came down at minute 20 and had 61 and fist pumped ‘what the hell is going on Nondas?’ That’s got to be it man, there’s no way!’ A couple weeks ago as the Runmageddon run approached I went out there and at minute 20 dropped to the ground after 66 pull ups. Fist pump time!
What I discovered was this. That whenever you tell yourself you can’t, you are bailing out. You are selling out on your potential. You’re brain is probably telling you that you can’t. But you can! You are an animal, with a monkey brain that’s evolved over many millennia. Your monkey brain is built to tell you unconsciously that you shouldn’t attempt such nonsense. I am no scientist or anthropologist, I just went out to do some pull ups and my mind was speeding up my heart and telling me to sit down and have a beer and a cigarette and I wanted to comply, so bad! But then I rejected the order, put on my shorts and went and did those damn pull ups and pulled as hard as I could.
The race is over, there is no competition to train for now. So I am going to go and do some pull ups anyway. I really don’t think I can do better than 66 but experience tells me, I’m wrong.
Let’s make something happen.
