But anyway. Beyond being a powerful motivational tool in themselves, the Rocky films make another important point about training: there are lots of ways to do it. So which one should you train like? Easy: the one you aren’t training like already. Each man has certain characteristics that should be part of any training plan, but each also has their flaws.

Here’s how it breaks down.

Rocky

Ah, Rocky. Hard worker, giver of amazing off-the-cuff speeches, lover of robot toys. The message of the Rocky films is a fine one – hard work beats talent – even if, strictly speaking, just getting really jacked is no substitute for actually learning to box. But anyway: Rocky is the epitome of the high-intensity grinder. He doesn’t periodise, he probably doesn’t work off percentages of his training max, he doesn’t think reps are a guarantee of a good workout, he doesn’t factor in rest days – he just goes out and trains his all-American balls off.

Try training like him if…You always go by what’s written in your workout plan, or you only train with intensity that’s ‘measurable.’ You might be overthinking your capacity for overtraining – maybe piling more good, honest, hard work in is actually what you need to bust through a plateau, whether that plateau is mental or physical. And some things are simply not measurable – like smashing a tyre with a sledgehammer or going all-out on the battling ropes or throwing a medicine ball as hard as you fucking can. These are still worthwhile training tools, though, and well worth trying your best on. Train yourself to put forth your maximum effort when there’s nobody around to count reps, and you’ll do better at anything.

Apollo Creed

Poor old Apollo: gets a kicking in every single appearance, and his finest moment is running along the beach in a vest. Still, there’s an important lesson for everyone in Rocky III: sometimes, you need to enlist other people. Specifically, you should occasionally train with other people for two key reasons: they’ll make you do the stuff you hate doing, and they’ll make you do it harder, faster, and for longer, than you’d ever do it alone. Deep in your heart, you *know* there’s stuff you should be doing – sprints, perhaps, or skipping, or learning to throw a jab, or doing proper warmups or more mobility work or long cardio recovery efforts or eating better – but, for whatever reason, you won’t do it. Or maybe you should just work harder than you can manage on your own.

Train like him if…You always train alone. Sometimes you should find someone who’ll do your programming for you, because they will make you do the stuff you hate but need. Personally, my wife keeps me honest about including single-leg work and hamstring assistance exercise in my programme – if she didn’t, I’d never do them. Similarly, I’ll occasionally go to the gym with work colleagues so that I *have* to do whatever workout I’ve planned. You can’t give up 12 minutes into a 5k row race when there’s another guy going just as fast as you. And you damn sure can’t let them win.

Clubber Lang

The polar opposite of the Creed approach, and an appropriate role model for anyone who needs a roomful of high-fives and 15 Facebook Likes before they think they’ve had a decent workout. In the words of the man himself: ‘I live alone. I train alone. I’ll win the title alone.’ That’s some serious self-belief from a man whose idea of training for a world title fight is doing wide-grip pullups in his cellar.

Train like him if… You normally have to train with other people – a PT, a class, or friends. This is obvious, but you should also train like Clubber if your pre-workout ritual is too elaborate: this describes you if you’ve ever said you can’t lift without your favourite music or your favourite bar/shoes/skipping rope. If you ever have to fight or run for your life, it probably won’t happen with your carefully-selected Metallica playlist running, so maybe occasionally you should train with whatever shitty Euro-trance your gym plays as a distraction. You know what Clubber Lang would do if his pullup bar didn’t have the right knurling? He would do pullups until it broke, snarling expletives at it all the time.

Ivan Drago

Ah, the Russian. Drago is the perfect example of Eastern-bloc efficiency, not just because he has a special running track with speedbags mounted on it, but because everything he does is pre-planned by Bridgitte Nielson and her team of sinister scientists. Measurable, well-planned training programmes work, and will occasionally allow you to punch another man’s head almost clean off.

Train like him if….You eschew any kind of planned training in favour of winging it and attacking every workout like a madman. Intensity works, but it doesn’t work as well as planned progression, with planned recovery workouts and phases of overreaching. If you’ve never followed a proper training plan, this is you: get on Starting Strength, or 531 or Greyskull, or something similarly sensible – but stop just throwing shit at a wall. Maybe get someone else to write you a programme. Maybe write your own. But if you don’t know how you’re going to train for the next month, you should work it out. And then attack those workouts like the entire politburo is watching them.

Adonis Johnson

Your last resort. At the start of Creed (minor spoilers incoming), Adonis Johnson is taking things a little bit too easily, effortless smashing up lesser fighters before he gets a fist-shaped lesson from the gloves of real-life world champ Andre Ward. Predictably, this lights a fire under his well-tailored fight-shorts, and six months later he’s training with Rocky Balboa to take on the light heavyweight champ of the world. The timespan’s truncated, sure, but the theory is sound.

Train like him if…Your training plan needs a kick in the ass. If you’ve been winging it recently,  or just coasting through workouts, then sign up for a fight, marathon, obstacle race, strongman competition, or whatever else you need to guarantee yourself public humiliation and pain if you don’t suck it up and start taking things seriously.

HOMEWORK: Work out which one of these fits you and get it in place. To recap: Balboa if you haven’t gone balls-to-the-wall in a while, Creed if you always train alone, Lang if you never train alone, and Drago if you need some programming. Get it done.

*In case you’re wondering, the Rocky films, ordered best to worst, go 3,4, Creed, Balboa,1,2,5. Don’t bother arguing: this isn’t a democracy, and you’re wrong anyway.

Recon Ron

The programme: You do pull-ups in decreasing sets every single day for six days, then take a day off. Next week, you add a rep or two to every set. On this schedule, you probably ought to hit 20 pullups in a month.

The upside: It’s a tonne of volume, so it’s likely to work. No single set is that challenging.

The downside: You have to do pullups every day. Even if you don’t find that boring, there’s a decent chance of getting elbow tendinitis.

Do it if: You’re planning on joining some branch of the military that’s going to require lots of pullups. Otherwise, it’s tough to see how the insane volume’s a good idea.

The Barstarrz Five-Day Split

So I got this from Harry Cloudfoot, who – because he doesn’t have a very big room – did it with L-sits, which is frankly ridiculous.  It’s five days of pullups, done in different variations: Monday is five sets to failure with 90s rest, Tuesday is a ladder with increasing rest, (1 rep:10 seconds, 2 reps:20 seconds, etc), Wednesday is nine sets split across three grips, Thursday is nine sets with one grip, and Friday is a repeat of whatever you found hardest.

The upside: The variations are fun: doing nine sets with a shifting grip is a fantastic way to get in more volume while hitting your muscles from different angles, and the ladder is a great challenge: I still do these occasionally even though I’m done with the plan. They’re pretty quick workouts too: you could do this in 11 minutes (ish) a day.

The downside: Again, it’s pullups almost every day – though slightly less damaging than Recon Ron because of the shifting grips. Monday and Tuesday’s workouts hurt, and if you have any honour you have to do one of them again on Friday.

Do it if: You want a bigger back and higher work capacity: this actually did more for my ability to crank out lots of sub-max sets than it did for my top-end numbers. Want to be able to do Murph strict in 40 minutes? This might be your plan.

The Waterbury Double

The plan: This comes from trainer Chad Waterbury, and it couldn’t be simpler. You do a single set to failure in the morning, a single set to failure in the afternoon, take a day off, and then repeat. To reiterate, that’s two sets of all-out pullups once every two days. Blam!

The upside: It doesn’t get much more time-efficient. And yes, it really does work. I used this to get to – at the time – my highest ever number of pullups at 18, and it only took a week.

The downside: You need a pullup bar you can access twice a day. Both sets are unpleasant. And you don’t get much volume in, so you won’t be prepared for higher numbers of pullups over a workout, or build a massive back.

Do it if: You want to get respectable numbers in a hurry – maybe for a bet or something.

CrossFit

The plan: Okay, this isn’t really a plan. It’s a way of working out, as seen on crossfit.com, that includes hundreds of pullups, sometimes in a single workout. I’m including it here because Crossfitters are obsessed with pullups – even if they sometimes stretch the definition.

The upside: You get a lot of reps in. From experience, I think it’s true that ‘kipping’ pullups – the ones where you wave your legs around – can somehow make you better at the strict version.

The downside: Many smarter people than me have debated the merits of the kipping pullup, so I’m not even going to get into the injury risks here. What I will say is: if you’re expecting a non-Crossfitter to be impressed by 30 ‘butterfly’ pullups, you are going to be badly disappointed.

Do it if: You’re looking for a more holistic workout plan and aren’t necessarily going strict.

Train Heroic

The plan: Nice and specific: you do pullups three times a week, for four weeks, doing a ‘heavy’ weighted day, a ‘moderate’ weighted day, and a ‘max reps at bodyweight’ day. The sets and reps change, but the format’s pretty easy to remember and follow.

The upside: It’s a nice, manageable plan that you can easily tag onto whatever you’re already doing in the gym – or at home, if you have a belt. It works really well, and it makes your weighted pullups better at the same time.

The downside: You need a belt – dumbbells between the legs won’t cut it. If you can’t already do about 12 pullups, it’s probably not your best bet.

Do it if: You’ve already got decent numbers but you’ve hit a plateau. This is the plan that got me to 21 strict pullups.

Greasing The Groove

The plan: This is Russian special forces trainer Pavel Tsatsouline’s option: I always thought it was the same as JDPATT (see below), but recently I’ve learned it’s more specific: you work out your max, then do half that many reps at intervals of at least 15 minutes (to let your ATP stores regenerate) through the day. When that number feels easy (or once a week) up the reps by one.

The upside: It’s a fantastic way to train. 50% of max isn’t enough to tax you, so you can do the pullups whenever – when you’re waiting for the kettle to boil first thing in the morning, last thing at night, after you get ready for work. It’s easy. It makes your pullups go up.

The downside: You really need your own pullup bar.

Do it if: You want to really crank your single-set numbers (and, to some extent, your work capacity) up, and you’re patient: this won’t work as fast as the Waterbury plan, but it’s a lot easier mentally and easier to keep up long-term. This is probably my winner, though every plan has its merits.   

Just doing pullups all the time

The plan: There is no plan. Just do pull-ups whenever the opportunity presents itself – while the kettle’s boiling, while you’re cooking dinner, before you shower, before work, after work, during work…whenever. Pavel Tsatsouline calls this ‘greasing the groove’,

The upside: This is a fantastic plan if ‘100 pull-up Saturday’ sounds like a fun challenge rather than a hellish chore. It’s highly adaptable, easy to follow, and fun.

The downside: This isn’t for you if you need structure or motivation before you’ll do any exercise.

Do it if: You own a pullup bar, you love doing pullups, and you aren’t training for anything specific. It’ll keep you ticking over.

In conclusion: Just pick one and do it. If it doesn’t work after you’ve given it an honest chance, do something else. The best pull-up plan, as with the best nutritional strategy or working practices, is the one that works for you. It might even change over time. There’s no wrong way to approach pullups – except for not doing them at all.