Repeatable Reps

By: Marcos Hernandez

A new trend among athletes here has been an obsession with getting better at kipping pull ups and toes to bar. Extra bodyweight work is always a good thing but in order to get better there needs to be some thought behind the practice.

Recently, an athlete I was working with got frustrated because they couldn’t complete as many toes to bar in a row as they believed they should be able to do. When I asked them what cue they were focusing on in order to get to their goal number, they couldn’t tell me.

Notice: this person was trying to do more reps without trying anything different! They believed their existing mindset and cueing when it comes to toes to bar would work as long as they simply “showed up.”

So, with some guidance, the athlete took a cue (it was keeping their eyes on the wall ahead of them), and was able to get more consecutive toes to bar. SUCCESS!

But can you guess what happened next? This cue still didn’t work well enough to get them as many reps as they felt they should have (their goal number was higher than before), and they got frustrated when the number of toes to bar didn’t increase past a certain point.

The problem? They were stuck in the same thinking as before: hoping that doing the same thing, over and over, will produce different results. Anyone know the definition of insanity?

This fault in logic shows up everywhere in the gym: in bodyweight moves, where the rep count is king, and in lifting, where the weight on the bar reigns supreme. 

What I want everyone reading this to realize is that there has to be a constant revisiting of the basics, a never ending search for inefficiencies, and a relentless focus on trying small adjustments to find the thing that gets you more reps or weight. Simply put, the strategies you use to get your 1stpull up most certainly will not be the same ones used to get you 10 in a row.

There’s never a time in the gym when reps should be completed without an awareness of a specific cue or focus. This is what I mean by “repeatable reps.” Can you reproduce the same technique on two consecutive reps, or five, or 25? If so, coaches can take a look at what you're doing and find another aspect of the movement for you to focus on and refine. Over time, the mastery of different cues will produce a more quality movement pattern, and therefore more reps/weight/efficiency in training.

For those paying attention, the second cue that helped the athletes get past their barrier was squeezing the glutes while arching on the forward swing. But eventually this cue won’t work, and so it’s on to the next one… then on to the next. 

Now expand this concept of deliberate focus and specific intention to every movement and every lift. Attention to detail and improvement are never ending pursuits, and that’s the point.