Skyrocket Your Pull-up and Chin-up Performance With These Expert Tips to Help You Master Bar Calisthenics And Beyond
Just last week, I got on the phone with none other than Al Kavadlo. In case you don’t know him, he’s a personal trainer in New York City who has carved out a reputation for specializing in bodyweight training, and in particular, what he calls pullup bar calisthenics.
And when I say he’s carved out a reputation, what I mean is that the guy is a bodyweight training beast. He can do some unbelievably challenging feats of strength, on the pullup bar and off it. But more importantly, Al has a talent for not just inspiring and empowering others, but for teaching them how to achieve these challenging feats of strength, too.
When we first got on the phone, I wasn’t completely sure what to expect, but I quickly found out that Al is not only a really genuine guy, but he also has a no-nonsense approach to fitness. He also has a knack for simplifying complex ideas into easy-to-understand and usually actionable solutions – a good quality for a coach.
Al has a way of keeping things simple without getting too esoteric, or worse yet, going “guru” on you. When he is wearing a shirt, you can be assured that he’s got nothing up his sleeve.
What’s Inside The Al Kavadlo Interview
Even though we only talked for about a half hour or so, I squeezed a lot of good advice out of him concerning pull-up training and bar calisthenics. Some of the things we talked about include…
- How Al’s background caused him to seek out and master bodyweight training
- Why everyone should be doing pull-ups
- How to make pullups harder or easier depending on your conditioning level
- How to scale an exercise to your skill level to take you right to your edge and no further
- The biggest mistakes people make when doing pullups and how to avoid them
- The best exercises to help you get your first, unassisted pullup
- The simple way to blend instinct with a proven system to get into your ideal training zone
- The major advantages that bodyweight training has over weight lifting
- The right time to start trying kipping pullups
- How to work up to the one arm pullup
And we talked about a lot more than that actually. Truth be told, while I’m editing the audio file, I usually jot down some notes about the interview to come up with the bullet points, and there was about 10 minutes of this one where I completely forgot to write anything down because I was just listening to some good discussion. Well, that is, I was either totally absorbed in the conversation or just completely spacing out.
Anyways, before we get to the interview, he’s a brief training video that Al put together about the pull-up exercise to get your neurons going…
So, if you…
-like pull-ups and want to get better at them, or you
-can’t do any pull-ups and want to be able to, or you
-can do a lot of pull-ups and want to learn some new tricks and variations to make them harder
…then you’ll be happy you listened to this interview with Al. Check it out below.
Update: This interview is now only available as part of The Pull-up Solution package here: The Pull-up Solution.
*Mp3 audio file, approximate length is 27 minutes
Wrap Up
I want to thank Al again for taking the time to do this interview. It was a pleasure to chat about training for a bit, and I’d love to do it again sometime.
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to pick up a copy of Raising The Bar, then you can order it directly from Al here, or from Amazon.com here.
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CST Coach, CST-KS
Health-First Fitness Coach
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More Information
The Pull-up and Chin-up Training Hub
Pull-ups and Chin-ups for Women: Interview with Shawna Kaminski
Thank you for this nice interview! I’m a fan of Al so it was a really nice surprise to see an interview with him on your site!