StrengthIn review

Assisted Pull-Up Machine

A vertical bodyweight pull performed with counterweight assistance from a machine.

This page is a working draft. A coach has not reviewed it, so read it as a starting point, not as checked instruction.

Pattern: Vertical pull
Modality: Strength
Difficulty: Beginner
Mechanic: Unknown
Force: Unknown
Laterality: Bilateral
Impact: Low
Trains where: Gym
At home: No

How to do it

Set up

Choose the assistance, secure your knees or feet on the pad, and take a firm overhead grip.

Do the rep

Pull your chest toward the handles while driving your elbows down.
Lower until your arms are straight without losing control of the assistance pad.

What counts as a rep

A rep counts when the chin clears the handles and the arms return to straight.

One rep starts with straight arms, reaches the top when the chin clears the handle line, and ends after a controlled return to straight arms.

Breathing

Exhale as you pull; inhale during the controlled descent.

Cues

Drive elbows down
Keep the trunk steady
Control the return

Common mistakes

Letting the assistance pad rebound
What you seeThe body drops quickly and the pad changes direction abruptly.
FixSlow the lowering phase and keep pressure on the pad.
A controlled pad keeps the assistance predictable and protects the return path.
Starting with bent arms
What you seeThe elbows remain bent at the bottom before the next pull.
FixReturn to straight arms under control before starting the next rep.
Straight arms ensure each pull starts from the same range.

Stop the set if

Stop if you feel sharp pain.
Stop if the support pad rebounds or your grip starts to slip.
End the set when you cannot meet the stated range under control.

General educational content, not individual coaching or medical advice.

Muscles worked

Prime movers

Latissimus dorsi · moderate confidence
Upper back · moderate confidence
Biceps · moderate confidence

Assisting

Forearms and grip · moderate confidence
Deep core / trunk stabilizers · moderate confidence

Equipment

Selectorized machine

Set the assistance pin and position the knee or foot pad as the machine specifies.

In the app

You log this by hand. The camera coach does not watch this movement yet.

Tracking: Camera candidate

How this page was checked

Draft. A coach reviewer has not signed this off yet.

Draft text is original and based only on the Wave-1 CSV and planning brief catalog/wave-1/033-assisted-pull-up-machine.md; no human review is complete.
The planning brief's assigned independent-source research is not complete.
Anatomy, technique, breathing, stop cues, and common-error guidance remain planning judgments pending the assigned review tier.
Candidate programming vocabularies, exact relation edges, and public tracking support remain unreviewed and fail closed.
The taxonomy has no assisted pull-up machine ID; selectorized-machine is the nearest available ID.
This pass treats assisted-reps as the legal modes supported by the CSV logging model; reviewer approval remains required.
The rewritten summary, rep standard, breathing, stop cues, and common errors are editorial judgements pending the assigned review tier.
Legacy relations are movement-pattern and equipment judgements; engine edges remain empty pending S2-CAT-005 approval.
Pass 2 rewrites the finish standard as a counting-only criterion and replaces the web title, summary, and meta description with exercise-specific copy; these editorial choices require review.
Pass 2 limits setup_notes to equipment settings or leaves it empty when no equipment-specific setup applies; this equipment judgment requires review.

All instruction and web text is original Allena draft text written from the Wave-1 CSV and record brief. No competitor or free-exercise-db instruction text was copied.

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