There is no shortage of videos on YouTube in which fitness influencers commit to doing a high number of reps in any given exercise for a period of 30 days to see what kind of effect it has on their physique. Daniel Witmer recently committed to a month of 100 daily pullups, and breaks down the pros and cons of the challenge in a new video on the Jump Rope Dudes channel.
At the start of the month, it takes Witmer quite some time to complete all 100 reps, but as time progresses and his performance improves, he soon finds that he is able to finish his pullup workout in well under an hour, usually between 35 and 45 minutes with a minute’s rest in between sets. However, towards the end of the 30 days, he was forced to quit.
“I made it to day 25, and in the middle of one of my sets, that’s when I injured myself,” he says. “I pulled a muscle above my lat in my upper back, and pretty much knew right then and there, I shouldn’t complete this challenge, because my arm really hurts.”
Witmer believes the injury occurred as a result of him training the same muscle groups continuously for a prolonged period of time without taking any time off to rest, which is always an inherent risk in these 30 day fitness challenges. “You can’t expect to do really strenuous activity like 100 pullups every single day and recover properly, that’s not how the body works,” he says. “In working out and exercising, especially weightlifting and doing resistance training, again whether it’s weightlifting or bodyweight exercises, you at least always want to take one rest day between your workouts.”
That being said, he does think that this kind of challenge can have some positive outcomes. For instance, he was able to improve his ability to perform multiple pullups consecutively, whereas beforehand he had only been able to do sets of chinups in a row.
“Pullups are one of those activities that just make you feel more confident,” he says. “When you yourself can bang out 20 pullups, it’s a hard activity that recruits a lot of muscles to do it, and it’s one of those movements that people generally don’t look forward to doing, like burpees, so when you are able to do a bunch of them, people definitely notice… If I can do this many pullups, I wonder what else my body can do?”
This article was first published on Men’s Health US.