If you have ever wanted to learn or struggled to do pull-ups (let alone one pull-up), understanding how to best go about mastering one can lead you down a rabbit hole with conflicting advice and opinions.

The reality is that most people don’t just learn to do a pull-up overnight unless they have an extensive background in athletic endeavors and/or lots of calisthenic-type and resistance-type training. Even so, the smooth and well controlled pull-up can still take a while to master.

Today I still see a lot of impatience and also misguided ideas about how best to develop pull-ups. Case in point is the over-prescription of banded pull-ups in the absence of other exercises aimed at shoring up strength and endurance in the muscles required to do a clean pull-up.

Strong and supple shoulders can take some serious work, and if you have ever worked your way through some nagging shoulders , perhaps some frozen ones (adhesive capsulitis), or worse (hopefully not!) then you know what we mean. Making sure your body can withstand the forces applied to it and do so throughout the full range of motion it is capable of is a great way to bulletproof yourself if there ever was one. While we can’t every guarantee that you won’t get hurt like some exercise styles or guru like influencers would like you to believe, you can certainly get stronger in all the ways a really mobile joint like the shoulder can move.

Bands aren’t always ideal for getting a huge stimulus for strength, but they can be a huge help when it comes to maintaining while travelling, adding some extra pump, maybe some unique ways of creating resistance in your workouts, and can indeed help pack on some muscle when used right. We love using bands for specific types of exercises where the resistance of the band adds difficulty or specific exercise perhaps matches the resistance profile of a specific muscle (group).