The humble pull-up is an often overlooked but necessary exercise to improve your bench press and build killer shoulders.
Shoulder presses, overhead presses, and bench presses are great pushing exercises that engage your upper back, core and maintain your shoulder health. However, if you don’t include pull-up exercises in your routine, you’re leaving a lot of unused energy on the table.
This simple exercise is easy to pull off, doesn’t require a lot of weight, and can even strengthen all those small tendons and ligaments. When your muscles and tendons can work together, you can push a heavy weight without risking injury!
How to Draw a Face
Face pulling requires a cable pulley machine where you can easily adjust the weight and attachment of the cable. This is a stretching/strengthening exercise, so you don’t need to carry heavy loads to get the benefits.
Many lifters are out and about 30 kilos weight to the finish line, but your mileage may vary. Adjust the weight to find the perfect spot where you can do 10 sets with a little gas left in the tank.
If you don’t have a cable puller, don’t worry! Using a resistance band it’s a great way to engage the same muscle groups without heavy exercise equipment.
Make sure that when you buy resistance bands, you choose open bands rather than loop ones. Wrap a band around a support beam in your basement (or even around a tree) and engage in movement like a cable machine.
4 Tips for Proper Form
Correct form is important with everything lifts, but this feels even more true for facelifts. This is a high-impact movement that hits smaller muscle groups, so making sure your form is spot on is key to success.
A few things to keep in mind while participating in this promotion are:
1. Go Slow. With such a low weight, you may be tempted to crank out as many sets as possible as quickly as possible, but going slow and steady is key here.
Be aware of the muscles you’re contracting as you pull the rope or band back, and give your upper back a little squeeze as you stand up.
2. Lean Back. Be sure to keep your body at a slight angle of 20 degrees as you back up. This takes pressure off your lower back and allows you to dig deeper into the movement.
3. Maintain Good Posture. If your posture drops, you’ll drop the weight of the pulley everywhere but your shoulders, and it can even lead to stress in your lower back.
From the starting position, keep your back straight and keep your core muscles engaged throughout the lift. Think of your upper body as a rigid board and move only your arms.
4. Don’t Roll Your Shoulders. It may feel natural to roll your shoulders forward at the bottom of the lift, but don’t do this!
Keep your shoulder muscles pulled back at all times and your upper back tight, and never fully extend your arms. Make sure to keep your back under pressure throughout the exercise for maximum results.
3 Common Mistakes
The facelift is a very troublesome movement, and it’s easy to get it wrong by taking an awkward position. Below, I wanted to take a quick look at some of the most common mistakes lifters make when engaging in this type of strength training.
1. Shallow range of motion. It is called a pulling the face for a reason! Make sure you pull the string all the way back to your face. If you have a shallow range of motion, you’re missing the meat and potatoes of the lift.
Squeezing your shoulders and back muscles together at the end of the lift is where you see muscle engagement, so if you let up a bit, you’re robbing yourself.
2. Too much weight. This is a stretching exercise more than anything, so it’s very important to keep the weight down. Although you it can be Pulling out 10 reps at 80 pounds doesn’t mean you it should.
If there is too much weight on the line, you will throw that weight to other areas of your body and risk shoulder injury. Nobody wants that.
3. Improper Handling. Your grip is also very important. The key here is to keep your palms facing your head. If your palms start to drift outward, they will throw the weight off your biceps, and this is not bicep work.
The grip tends to drift because there is more weight on the line, so if you notice that your grip is dragging, reduce that weight!
When Integrating Faces into Your Exercise Program
So, is a facelift best preserved on a shoulder day, or does it pair better on a back day?
Ideally, both should be used!
Fitness in this amazing upper body workout for building muscle is best used one to three times a week and is best used at the end of each set. I like to build a routine of lifting exercises with push and pull and finish the set with face pulls.
While it’s a great building block, it’s also great for warming up or cooling down. This movement helps stretch out the tight muscles in your upper arms and shoulders and builds strength in all those tight muscles.
When you work at a computer all day, a few movements feel as good as pulling a face. Even on rest days, hitting the pull-up machine to stretch those muscles in your upper back helps relieve tension and improve the mobility of your shoulders.