Well it took 42 years
Other than a couple of weeks ago on NBC TV’s The Biggest Loser, I had never seen a really fat person do pull-ups. It’s so unlikely isn’t it? I mean how does someone who weighs in excess of 280 pounds with gravity acting on that mass pull themselves up over a bar? I know for a fact that it’s difficult to do.
Do you remember those physical fitness tests you had to take in middle school P.E.? Never mind about the trauma of undressing in front of people in the locker room. Maybe you were the type that looked forward to physical fitness testing: the sit-ups, the push-ups, the mile run, and yes, the dreaded pull-ups. Were you the one that could do 15 pull-ups, and keep going and going like the Energizer bunny? Were you able to do 80 sit-ups in three minutes and 100 pushups in the same amount of time? I remember being envious of those athletic people in gym class.
As for me, I was the short, fat kid who couldn’t do anything, maybe 5 push-ups and 18 sit-ups on a good day. The most humiliating thing was to go to the pull-up bar, knowing that it would take a huge effort just to get my hands on the bar, and then not be able to do a single pull-up. Pretty much it was only the girls and the fat kids who couldn’t do pull-ups at that age. Just one of the few reasons I hated P.E…
I just can’t believe what happened today at the gym during my workout.
I was getting ready to do a “negative” pull-up. That’s when you jump up to the highest position you can just below the top of the pull-up bar, and let yourself down as slow as you can. These “negative” exercises are designed to build up the strength to perform difficult exercises. My trainer says that negative pull-ups help you to get better at performing the bench press, and obviously, better at doing pull-ups. I’ve been doing this negative pull-up exercise for about two weeks now, maybe only three times total.
So I get my hands on the bars, and was just about to hang, when I sensed additional strength in me. And then I actually pulled my head over the top of the bar!
Un-be-lievable! I actually did a pull-up, and not just one pull-up, but a total of 16. My five sets of pull-ups were: 5, 3, 2, 3, and 3. Wow. These pull-ups were 42 years in the making. I’m totally stoked.
