Palm Cooling for Pull-Up Endurance
Palm cooling is a proven method for increasing muscle endurance and gaining strength faster. It’s that unfair advantage you’ve always wanted without the side effects of steroids.
It works by offloading heat as you work out, allowing you to push harder longer, which is awesome if you want to increase your pull-up endurance and volume.
Instead of doing just a couple of sets, or experiencing a significant drop off in volume as you progress through your sets, palm cooling lets you keep going and going and going.
To increase your pull-ups volume with palm cooling, try one of these protocols.
10 x AMRAP Twice Per Week
This was the protocol used in the original Stanford study.
Perform 10 sets of max effort pull-ups.
Between each set, cool your palms for 3 minutes.
Complete this protocol twice per week, ideally with 2 or 3 days of rest between sessions.
10 x AMRAP Once per Week
Do the same protocol as above, but only complete this once per week. I tried this and saw a 50% increase in pull-up volume over six weeks. Less than the 144% average from the study, but with less work. Still impressive!
8 x AMRAP; 6 x 5 Weighted
Not everyone wants to spend 40 minutes doing pull-ups twice per week. But the benefit of palm cooling comes from being able to do more sets than normal and a similar intensity.
For this protocol, we reduce the number of sets but add in a second day with weighted pull ups. This is a good option for people who like to train in upper body / lower body splits, hitting each one twice.
On your first upper body day, perform 8 sets of max effort pull-ups with 3 minutes of cooling.
On the second upper body day of the week, perform 6 sets of 5 weighted pull-ups with 3 minutes of palm cooling.
For the weighted pull-ups, pick a weight you can do across all 6 sets. If you complete all sets unbroken, increase the weight by 2.5 to 5 pounds the next week.
