Celebrity personal trainer Daniel McKenna says pull-ups are "empowering." He explains how to go from a pull-up zero to hero.

<div class="block">Celebrity personal trainer Daniel McKenna says pull-ups are &quot;empowering.&quot; He explains how to go from a pull-up zero to hero.</div>

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Fitness in 4: Perfect Pull-ups

Daniel. The pull up looks pretty cool. But why is it so important to me? It's so important because it's such an empowering exercise and an empowering movement that transfers into real life situations as well. So today you're gonna teach us a few different steps on how to do a pull up regardless of what our fitness level is. That's right over the years I've mastered how to teach people how to do pull ups on my own fitness app, the Irish Night Fitness App. I have a five stage pull up program to help you get there. Ok. So what's the first one? First one is you're gonna step up, uh, good grip of the bar facing out. So don't let go. You can step off and you're just gonna hang. So you can start with five seconds, you can walk all the way up to 30 seconds, abs engaged, holding on feet out in front and you just chill out there. You just hang there pretty easy. Easy, peasy step. Number two, step number two, you take it up a notch so you're gonna jump up and you're gonna hold your chin up over the bar. I feel like you can get up, you just hold it there. OK. How does that feel? Just hold it, just hold it there. This is painful. It's hard. Just hold it. Same thing. Five seconds. Walk away for 30 seconds. OK. Control the way down. Step two. OK. What's step number three, step number three is you're gonna go back up to the top, but this time when you're coming down, you're gonna go as slow as you possibly can. So this is the negative that we talk about as slow as you can all the way right till you lock it out. Beautiful. So that I gotta go back up and then do it all over again. Yes, you do. Just keep going. There you go slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, beautiful. That's painful too. All right. So that's the negative. And we would say is you work your way up to the, you can go as slow as you can and do that multiple times before you go on to the next one step. Number four, step number four is we add a resistance band. So I have a few different bands here. And the way I like to show it is the bigger the band is, the more assistance you have. We're going to go with the bigger band here where you just loop it in and you pull it all the way down. There you go and I'll give you a hand here. So if you have a trainer or you're working out with your partner, partner will pull it down. You pull it around your foot, push down and a wee tip is you wrap this foot around that foot. Ok. So that it doesn't come off. There you go. Ok. So, now you would step off and with the assistance of the band, you would do your pull up. Are you gonna do a full pull up? Pull up all the way from the bottom. Ok. All the way up to the top. It's so much easier with this band. I know. Right. And you can do the full range of motion range motion. So this is gonna get you used to doing the full range of motion and getting used to the actual exercise of a pull up and then if I get better before I go freestyle, I can just switch the band hands until it gets easier and easier. Yeah. So that's where you would go down and make the band lighter and lighter and lighter. So your assistance gets less and less and less that way you get stronger. Ok? And the final step, final step, the big step five, this is one of the most empowering moments for a lot of people, a lot of my clients when they do this, it's like their best part of their day. So the goal is that you will step off and everything you've learned so far is abs on good grip. And you just pull yourself up over that ball. Here we go. There you go. That way you're getting strong from top to bottom.