Being able to do your first Pull Up is so often one of our first training goals in the gym. And it is a great goal to have. Having good pulling strength is incredibly beneficial during sports like swimming, rowing, powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting.

The pull up is great because it puts a high amount of emphasis on the lats, the largest upper body posterior muscle, which fan across the majority your back.

However, the pull up is not the only vertical pulling exercise that you should consider using to strengthen the lats…

Enter another cult classic, the Lat Pulldown.

The Difference Between Pull Ups and Pull Downs

Muscle Activation

The pull up has greater muscle activation than the lat pulldown in the key muscle groups like the lats, but also in the core. So, if you were going to use both in a training programme, you may use the pull up for your higher intensity work and a lat pulldown for your higher volume work.

Resistance Technique

The pull up, as we all know, uses our bodyweight for resistance. Whereas the lat pulldown uses a weight adjustable cable. This gives you more training flexibility because you can train at higher volumes through a vertical pull than you would be able to with pull ups -

• If you can only do 2 sets of 5 pull ups, you may then go and do some lat pulldowns to increase your training volume.

• If you haven’t managed to do you first pull up yet, then you may use the lat pulldown to build your vertical pulling strength.

Grip Variations

The lat pulldown comes with a huge variety of grip variations, with a personal favourite of ours being the single arm grip variations. They allow you to easily load your lats unilaterally, at any experience level. This is great to reduce side to side imbalances but also to train the lats at an even greater muscle length than possible with bilateral grip variations, which is great for inducing further muscle damage and adaptation.

Should I Do Pull Ups or Lat Pulldowns?

Both are great exercises and using both in a training programme is a great idea. But there are instances where you may consider having a greater bias towards one or the other.

Pull Ups

• If you are training for gymnastics styles exercises or competitive functional exercise sports that require you to be able to do exercises like muscle ups, kipping pull ups or just to be able to string together lots of strict pull ups.

• If you compete in a sport like swimming - During your swimming training, you are already getting huge amounts of pulling volume in, under lower resistance, so filling the gaps the sport misses with higher intensity pulling with pull ups, would be good.

• If you enjoy pull ups or have specific goals for your pull ups (specificity is king).

Lat Pulldown

• For sports like powerlifting or weightlifting, where lat strength is important but not the most important element of your training, but also where huge amounts of effort are exerted on your main gym-based exercises, the squat, bench and deadlift, or the snatch, clean and jerk, respectively, it may be good to choose the lat pulldown.

• If you have poor thoracic mobility – with the lat pulldown, you can more easily alter the angle of your torso before your pull. This may be beneficial if you struggle with your upper back and shoulder mobility and can’t get your arms all the way above your head. You can slowly increase the inclination of your torso, as your mobility improves over time. Whereas the easiest version of the traditional pull up requires good prerequisite levels of upper back and shoulder mobility.

Written by guest author Ewan Hammond.

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Tags: Equipment > Pull Up Bars