Hey guys. So I was thinking about my pull up journey and how it took me so long to even do my first pull up. If I had to do it over again, what would I have done differently? Well, for one thing, I would not have placed so much hope in machine lat pull downs. The fact is, even if you do an endless number of these exercises you're not going to wake up one day and miraculously perform a pull up. The machine pull down is a very similar movement but it doesn't translate into pull up strength as much you might think. If you do perform lat pull downs, my suggestion is to do them with a cable pull down bar that forces you to use your core while doing the exercise. This is because your core will need to be engaged when you do your first pull up.
I also made the mistake of doing machine-assisted pull ups rather than just using a pull up bar and a band. A band-assisted pull up is better than the machine because you still have to control your body weight and have some element of stabilization working for the motion. With the machine-assisted pull up, it's not quite the same.
A final mistake I made was thinking I needed to do as many pull ups as possible by taking my sets to failure. If you do this, you're likely to get fatigued to the point where your next set is going to be heavily impacted and the number of reps you do will be significantly reduced. A better approach would be to stop a couple reps short of failure to keep something in the tank for your subsequent sets. For example, today I performed a set of 3 pull ups, then rested, then performed an additional set of 3 until I completed a total of 12 pull ups.
Just a final note on getting that elusive first pull up. You should treat your pull ups just like you do every other exercise you perform in terms of constantly trying to make them harder. You don't necessarily have to keep your pull ups to one day a week only. There's absolutely no problem with doing band-assisted pull ups every day if you really want to. I've been ending all of my workouts with a few sets of bodyweight pull ups and it's been great.
Have a wonderful evening and watch out for tomorrow's snow!