Update Number 1 on January 2nd (already procrastinating on the posts)

And so we begin. Once again, I’m Evan Boydstun.

Current pull-up tally on January 2nd: 600 Pull-Ups

300 yesterday, and 300 today.

In Order for me to hit 100,000 pull-ups in a year, I need to hit 273.972603 pull-ups/day (this justifies any partial reps when I get tired)

So why pull-ups?

Look, I’m 5’9’’ on a good day so I was never the biggest kid, never the strongest, and never the fastest BUT I realized that pull-ups are one of those movements that aren’t necessarily based on size (unless you’re a knuckle scraper then.. sorry). Not everyone can do them and it was definitely impressive to see someone bang out 10+ pull ups in one set (at least impressive to me). They are, more or less, relative to YOUR strength. It became very personal to me because I was competing with myself. I currently weigh 178lbs. depending on what I did the night before, so if someone tried to tell me “oh but you weigh less than me,” (sure, there’s some merit to that) ..so I started adding weight to my pull ups. If you’re active, you should have the relative strength.

Today (January 2nd) I worked out during my lunch break as well as afterwork. Thankfully, I have a gym below my office building where I can bang out 200 pull-ups, 150 Dips, and 150 push-ups in about 30 minutes (and yes there’s showers). When I left the office, I went straight to the gym to do a shoulder workout (I have tiny shoulders, please bully me people, that works for me) and knocked out 100 more pull-ups.

I get it, 300 pull-ups, can I REALLY do that?

Funny you should ask arm-chair quarterbacks!

This has been years in the works. To circle back, everyone else was bigger and stronger than me but I found something that would give me my own personal edge. I started with assisted pull-ups until I was finally able to do 1 completely unassisted, and then built from there.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2019: I saw Aquaman and OH MY GOD what a Hunk amirite?? I looked up Jason Mamoa’s training for Aquaman and noticed he was doing a bunch of HIIT workouts that included a ton pull-ups. I started replicating the workouts and realized I was increasing the amount that I could do in one session tremendously. Also, HIIT workouts came in to play at the perfect time as I was traveling a lot for work and some of the hotel gyms only had a pull-up bar and some free weights, so I learned to love it.

In October, I got to the point where I was doing a set of 10 pull-ups with a 50lbs. Kettle Bell attached to me, immediately drop off the weight and knock out 10 more. 5 Sets for 100 overall reps. I figured that would translate to 200 reps with no weight, and it did.

And here we are now, 300 Pull-Ups in a day… about 7 years of hard work in the making.

6 Weeks ago, when I decided to do this personal challenge, I had to make sure I could even work up to 300/day and lemme tell ya, these lats were sore.

Check out how absolutely cheesy I look, the quote on the back of the shirt is the icing on the cake.