I did 9 consecutive pull ups in July. It was improvement by +2 💪 from June!
I am very close to my first milestone – 10 consecutive pull ups.
Hot weather continues in July, so it was still harder to do workouts during day. I was still doing workouts in the late evening when my bars was in shadow. Still had busy social life, had guests several times till late night. I was enjoying summer but same time I felt that I was not improving good enough.
Also, I was feeling, that all my pull up repetitions are very hard to perform. I thought I have to change some exercises, or something. Because my body has adapted to usual load and I have to hit it in different ways. I read few discussions, where guys are asking what to do when progress is stall. And one of advices was, to work more on endurance, if you are close to 8 reps. For example, in last rep of the set, keep holding up for as long as possible and then slowly go down. Do so called negative reps. It will hit muscles harder. I was starting to do that. At the end of every set I did hold as long as possible and then negative rep.
After this hot and busy month and doing more accent on endurance, I performed 9 pullups. Despite it was very hard, and I felt really exhausted, I was surprised that I was able to add 2 reps during month. I believe doing negative pullups has helped a lot to achieve +2 reps. But anyway, I still had feeling that my cardio and endurance is my weakest spot and I need to keep working to improve that. I hope my additional hold on bar, and negative repetitions will help to improve that during next month.
With running, I tried to grow the distance, and finished 10km distance for the first time! I just wanted to finish 10km despite I knew that it was hard for my joints, especially for knees. And I was right. Next days I felt pain in outside of my knees. I found out that it is so called Iliotibial band syndrome (also known as: IT band syndrome, ITB syndrome, or ITBS) and it is one of the most common overuse injuries among runners. So it was clear that 10km was too much for my knees. I tried that distance for the first time, but I am not going to do that again in near future. I will run 6km next time. It was usual and very comfortable distance for me for now.