Women can do pullups; here's the secret

Think women can’t do pullups? Think again.

The key is not exhausting muscles during training.

“I got my first pullup on April 27 of 2014. It’s like giving birth: You don’t forget that,” said Col. Robin Gallant, 55. “I kicked it on my last (physical fitness test), I got 15; and now I’m up to an ugly 17, a pretty solid 16.”

With the right diet, weight training, doing CrossFit and practicing pullups, Gallant said she has built a good deal of lean muscle.

“It doesn’t make you look like a man,” she said. “Anybody that says that is full of crap.”

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Gallant, the comptroller for the II Marine Expeditionary Force, learned how to do pullups under the tutelage of Maj. Misty Posey, who developed an approach that the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Robert Neller, is looking at to institute corps-wide.

The technique the major has refined through the years is having people do pullups three to five times a day for at least three days a week, Posey said.  The key to success is not maxing out each set.

When Posey wrote her paper Starting from Zero: The Secret to Pull-up Success, she particularly wanted to reach female Marines.

“I didn’t want them to make the same training mistakes I did and give up before they learn pullups and think it was their gender that prevented them from learning a pullup,” she said.

For Posey, learning how to do pullups was a necessity. As a midshipman trying to make it through the University of San Diego's Reserve Officer Training Corps program, her instructors made her run through the obstacle course at Marine Recruit Depot San Diego, she said.

Standing 4 feet, 10 inches high, Posey said she was at a distinct disadvantage compared to the other midshipmen.

“As you can imagine, the obstacles are all very tall because no women train at MCRD San Diego, so there were no ramps; there were no steps,” said Posey, who now works in Manpower and Reserve Affairs. “My PT instructor ... basically said, ‘You need to figure it out.’ ”

Posey needed to build upper-body strength so she could hoist herself over the obstacles. But no matter how much exercise she did in the gym, she still was unable to do a single pullup, she said.

Then, a gunnery sergeant who worked at the gym saw her struggling and gave her advice that changed everything.

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“He said, ‘Get out of my gym. Get on a pullup bar,’ ” Posey said. “He said, 'If you don’t have a partner to help spot you when you need it, … pull up as far as you can.

" 'If you can only pull up half way, keep doing that. Eventually, you’ll be able pull up higher.' " she said. "He was right.”

After five days of doing jumping pullups, body weight negatives in which she lowered herself from her highest position very slowly, partner-assisted pullups and partial range of motion pullups, Posey said she was able to do her first proper pullup.

She was excited to share what she had learned, but when she told people that anyone can do a pullup, she said they laughed at her.

“I would be told, ‘You’re the exception,' ” Posey said. “So if I’m the exception, what’s the rule? The rule that people were thinking was that physical weakness is a woman’s natural and irreversible condition and any woman who is physically strong is an exception to that rule.”

Later, a male colleague challenged her to do 20 pullups, so she said she consulted a kinesiology major at her school. Kinesiology is the study of body movements.

He told her that the trick to training for pullups is to stop exercising before hitting muscle failure.

“So the approach a lot of Marines take is every other day they’ll do a couple max sets of pullups,” Posey said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but ... they tend to plateau and they’ll stay there indefinitely unless they do something different.

“I do pullups almost every day … several times a day," she said. "I get up on the bar and I’ll do a few sets and I will always stop well short of failure. So my max set is about 25.

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"But when I do pullups, I’ll do a little ladder: I’ll do one, come off the bar, wait 10 seconds; then do two, come off the bar, wait 10 seconds; I’ll work up to five or six and then I go back to one.”

Posey will do two or three ladders within a 5-minute period several times throughout the day, she said. Each ladder is about a third of the maximum number of pullups she can do.

“The way you get good at pullups is to do a lot of pullups," she said. "You don’t have to tear your muscles down, make them sore and make them bigger to get pullups.

“You just have to train the motor patterns. Your central nervous system needs that constant repetition,” Posey said.

Capt. Kimberly Sonntag, the Marine who told Neller about the plan, said she has used the techniques in Posey’s paper to go from zero to four pullups in a month.

“Like most people, the way I was training was wrong,” Sonntag said. “I thought, 'Well I can’t do a pullup, so I should use a band or I should use the Gravitron (exercise machine). So it did force me to get off those things that were not working.”

Sonntag also has hyper-mobile joints, which move beyond the normal range with little effort, and that has made it very hard for her to get into the right position to pull herself up, she said. Posey’s program gave her specific exercises so she could be strong enough to start doing pullups from a dead hang.

Women often train for pullups by isolating muscle groups, such as their biceps, when pullups require them to use all of their muscles at the same time, she said.

“There is a perception — both with men and even with women — that women can’t do pullups,” Sonntag said. “This just shows that with the proper training, women can do pullups. They can pull their own body weight.”

Follow Jeff Schogol on Twitter: @JeffSchogol