Do you remember how many years in you started adding weight to pull-ups? I have a personal goal to eventually do 5 body weight pull-ups, but it feels like that will be a long way off. How quickly do the genetically gifted amongst us progress?
I am not genetically gifted but I'll give my opinion
I remember the first 3 or 4 months after I started to work out, it was a real struggle to execute more than 2 reps of either chin-ups or pull-ups. and those 2 reps were with my whole body shaking like I am about to explode. I remember I started with narrow grip chin-ups and eventually migrated to pull-ups trying to widen the grip over time.
as for a particular approach, I remember back then in 2012 MrOogieBoogie casually shared his "pyramid scheme" in the Fitness OT4 for doing pull-ups and sounded like a good idea so I decided that that's what I was going to try.
so I would do 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 and I'd stay a month going up to 5. Going down the pyramid is the real difficulty, once you reach 6 and are like "yyyay new PR!" doing 5 reps directly afterwards is hard as all hell but eventually you nail the complete pyramid.
I remember I reached the 9th rep set before chaging my scheme, so I was doing 81 reps on a session! It helped me a ton with that.
for those who manage to do 2 or 3 reps, you gotta stick to it, even if it seems discouraging at first, the reps will come. Make two small pyramids, 1-2-3-2-1 and again 1-2-3-2-1.
still using bands for volume too, but I miss the full ROM assistance the gravitron provided.
