Pull-ups have obvious benefits for grapplers. They strengthen the grip, and strengthen your pulling power, which is used during things like spider guard. Pull-ups also help improve your posture by pulling your shoulders back, countering the common forward hunch of people who sit on the computer all day. For aesthetic purposes, they help create an attractive ‘V’ shape by widening the upper back.
The Iron Gym pull-up bar is an inexpensive pull up bar that you can attach to a doorway. The prerequisites are that the doorway has to be within a certain range of width and it has to have trim above the frame. Most of the force is transmitted through the bars that extend out on the side; you are NOT hanging your weight off the trim at the top of the door frame.
The Iron Gym allows you to do pull ups with a narrow or wide grip, with your hands facing away(pronated), facing towards you(supinated), or neutral, facing each other. I’ve owned one for over 10 years and it’s still holding up great and it’s still in regular use.
I recommend two different approaches depending on if you can leave the bar in the doorway all the time or not.
If you can leave the bar in the doorway all the time, then every time you pass through the doorway, do about half as many reps as your maximum. e.g. If you can do 10 reps max, then every time you walk through the doorway, do 4 or 5 reps. Never go to failure, and stop if you feel your form degrading at all. This is known as ‘Greasing the groove’ or ‘synaptic facilitation’, and was made famous by Pavel Tsatsouline. See this link for more:
http://www.cbass.com/Synaptic.htm
The previously mentioned approach is inconvenient if you have to take the bar out of the doorway frequently. For example, if it’s your office door, and you need to lock your door regularly. In that case, try this:
In 3 minutes, do as many reps as you can. You’ll probably go to failure in the first minute or so, and the rest of the time will be grinding out singles and doubles. This is a form of ‘rest-pause‘ training.
If your doorway is too large, try this tip:
You can make a homemade extension using inexpensive plumbing pipe. See these two links for more info:
https://sites.google.com/site/projectsofp/barextension
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3CH4UDCO065DP/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0002ZDINO#R3CH4UDCO065DP
You can check out more reviews of the Iron Gym here: