Important Note
All references to pullups and chinups in this article refer to deadhang pullups, where you go all the way down until your elbows lock out and all the way up until your chin clears the bar. No kipping.
Pullups In Coast Guard Basic Training?
Why am I writing a lesson on pullups in Coast Guard Boot Camp when they aren’t required for the physical fitness test?
Well I know that the Coast Guard is not the Marine Corps, but you should follow your brothers and sisters in arms and include pullups in your training regimen.
By the way, if you ended up on this page and you ARE training for the Marine Corps PFT, this will help you too.
If you don’t have the strength to do even one pullup right now, don’t worry!
I’ve created four routines for you and each one is geared toward a different starting strength level.
Before we get to those though, I want you to understand why you should be doing pullups in the first place.
The Benefits Of Pullups
1. Pullups develop overall upper body strength which will assist you with your performance on other exercises that the Coast Guard does require – including pushups. If you work on your pullups at the same time as you work on your pushups, your performance on pushups will improve much faster than if you only practice pushups.
2. Pullups work more muscles in your body than almost any other upper body exercise. They work various parts of your back, your shoulders, your biceps and forearms, and they even engage your core muscles.
3. The muscular endurance required for performing increasingly higher numbers of pullups will help you with swimming. While swimming is very unique and largely relies on technique, to some extent – especially for shorter distances like the Coast Guard’s swim test – you can slightly make up for sloppy form with solid muscle endurance.
I don’t want you to confuse the above statement with me telling you that you can somehow muscle your way through the swim test because that’s not what I’m saying. If you don’t know how to swim, you will have to learn. Pullups won’t do anything for your swimming technique, they’ll just help you with the muscle endurance required to complete the swim test. For more on that topic, please read swimming in Coast Guard Boot Camp.
4. You’ll be surprised but many of the Company Commanders at Cape May are former Marines turned Coasties. My Lead Company Commander was a Jarhead and before I even found out, I could kind of tell. Marines just have a presence to them that says “I kick serious @$”. When my Lead Company Commander yelled at me I literally felt my soul shaking. With that said, Marines LOVE pullups. If one of your Company Commanders turns out to be a former Marine, he will probably make you do pullups at some point during PT – mine did. This is where you can earn bonus respect points. If you can bang out more pullups than the rest of your company or even just put up some good numbers, it’ll help you.
I could keep going on and on about the benefits, but I want to get to the actual routines. The bottom line is that they are extremely good for you and should be included in any workout regimen. Again, it doesn’t matter if you can’t do any right now. I’ve created four starting strength levels and then adapted a great pullup routine to match each level.
Choose Your Pullup Routine
Select the routine that matches your current fitness level:
If your current max set of pullups is:
0-4 reps, please read sections A&C
5-7 reps, please read sections A&B
8-14 reps, please read section A
14-20+ reps, please read sections A&D
A) The 100 Pullups Routine (if your max set of pullups is 0-4)
For those of you who are too weak to be able to perform even one dead hang pullup correctly, or can do very few, you have some options.
1. Assisted Pullup Machine
If you workout at a gym, many of them have assisted pullup machines. There’s one at my gym called a “Gravitron”. Fancy name I know. What it does is take weight off of your own bodyweight so that when you perform the pullup you aren’t pulling up all of your own weight. Lets say that you weigh 180 pounds. You would select how much you want to strip from that 180 when performing your pullup. We’ll say 80 pounds. You then step up to the pullup bar, which has this padded platform you kneel on when performing your pullups.
What the platform does is that it pushes upwards against your bodyweight, at whatever weight you choose – so in our example 80 pounds. Since the pad you are kneeling on is generating a force equivalent to 80 pounds in the same direction you are moving your body (up), it means that your muscles only have to worry about the remaining 100 pounds. Unfortunately, It also takes core muscle activation out of the exercise because having your knees resting on the platform keeps your body stable.
If you have access to one of these, you will do the normal 100 pullups routine as described in part A but using this gizmo. What you’ll want to do is test a weight out that allows you to complete a max set of 10 pullups. So using our example again, if you weigh 180 and you put the machine on 80 pounds (thus taking that 80 off of your own weight) and at that weight you max out at 10 reps then that’s your working weight. If it’s too hard and you can only do 7 reps then play around with the numbers until you get it right. If you pick a weight where you are able to do 9 or 11 reps that’s fine too. Once you have that weight just follow the process described in section A.
2. Negatives and Flexed Arm Hangs
If you don’t have access to an assisted pull up machine, then you will want to do a modified chinup routine using a combination of negatives and flexed arm hangs. You will get a stable chair or some sort of other stable platform and put it in front of the pullup bar. Step up onto the platform and hoist yourself into the top position of a chinup (palms facing toward you). Let yourself down as slowly as possible in a controlled manner.
When you get to the very bottom, step back onto the platform, take a few breaths and repeat. Follow the 100 pullups routine as outlined in part A, but instead of doing real pullups, do reps of these negatives. If you aren’t strong enough to do 5 reps of negatives, then follow the advice in part B – cut back on reps per set, increase the rest time between sets, etc.
When you start getting stronger, do a flexed arm hang every 5th set and then rest 3 minutes before continuing to the next set. To do a flexed arm hang you will follow almost the same procedure as described for negatives. The only difference is that once you hoist yourself up into the top position of the chinup, you’re going to stay there and hold on as long as you can instead of just lowering yourself slowly right away.
So your routine should look like this:
- 4 sets of negatives with 1 minute rest in between
- 1 set of flexed arm hang with a 3 minute rest after
- 4 rounds of this for a total of 20 sets
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading this lesson and that you learned something from it.
You can return to the Physical Preparation Page to check out some more FREE lessons on Coast Guard Boot Camp Training.
Oh, and if you found this lesson helpful, please consider spreading the love with others who you think would benefit from it.
As always, thank you for your support.