There are few perfect fitness moves out there.  Many of them are silly (pec-deck flyes), or rough on the joints (upright rows), or just laughable (seated one-arm Swiss Ball curls), and can just be dismissed from the list altogether.  Much as they are revered by the hardcore, and as much good as I've gotten out of them over the years, squats and deadlifts are both tough to learn, quick to both stoke and bruise the ego, and quick to cause nasty injuries of all kinds, either through years of poor technique or via a moment or two of inattention on a big lift.

So, nope, neither the squat nor the deadlift make my short list of perfect exercises.  Address comments below to "How Dare You Call Yourself a Fitness Blogger?" 

Topping my list is...the pull-up (and its supinated cousin, the chin-up).  They were tough in 8th grade when you did them as part of the Presidential Fitness  Test; if anything, they're tougher now that you're 60 pounds heavier and about half as active.  I've never seen anyone for whom pull-ups were easy, even just with body weight (okay, maybe this guy).  Like push-ups, pull-ups never stop giving; they'll never stop being a pain in the butt to do and they'll never stop making you stronger, fitter, and more athletic. 

They're a functional move as well:  in few other exercises do you work the muscles that allow you to climb--a tree, a ladder, a set of monkey bars--which, if you think back to your life in the jungle, lo, just a few generations ago, back when we were all Tarzan-esque in build and intelligence, was a pretty important thing to do--whether you were climbing out of reach of a predator or scrambling up a tree in search of something pretty, juicy, or delicious to bring back to your date.  These arms were made for climbin'. 

(Misery loves company.)  

But how, oh how, do you get better at chin-ups?  What if you're stuck in single- or doubles-ville on pull-ups, and are about ready to throw in the towel?

Part of why I think that owning nothing but crappy equipment is sometimes preferable to having full access to 'good' stuff is that it forces you to stick with the basics.  I spent much of my youth wishing I had a lat-pulldown machine so I wouldn't have to do multiple sets of pull-ups twice a week instead of the pulldowns that all the programs I read about recommended.  I cursed the bloody exercise time and time again, but I did them so often that the chin-up bar that spanned my bedroom's doorframe cracked the wall that held it, and my parents cursed ME.  And I got good at pull-ups as a result.

So one way to get good at pull-ups is to just freakin' DO them and stop doing lat pulldowns instead.

Lots of articles have been written on this topic (most recently at T-Muscle) I'm just going to add my two cents on a technique that has worked well for me and some of my clients:  the 'Do Lots of Singles" technique.

I started working with this system a few months back.  At the time, I was doing multiple mini-sets of five pullups as part of some obstacle course training I was doing:  jump over a bench, do five pullups on the bar, be ar crawl 20 yards, etc.  The intention wasn't to exhaust the muscles with any given set; just to do something quick and challenging as part of an obstacle course largely focused on conditioning.  

One day I added up the number of pullups I was doing over the course of the entire workout and it was around 70.  I realized this was far more than the number of pull-ups I was able to do if I was working with straight sets to failure (or close to it) as part of a standard workout, even though none of them felt especially difficult--because, after all, they five-rep sets with body-weight.  After several weeks of this kind of work I randomly maxed out on pull-ups one day and bested my all-time record by three reps.  For the first time in my life, I'm sniffing around the 30-rep mark.  

I wondered if the same system--or something akin to it--would work for clients who were having a tough time getting even eight good pull-ups.  Instead of five-rep sets, I just had them do a single pull-up every time we went by the pull-up bar in the gym.  Over the course of the hour-long workout, they were doing close to 20 pull-ups with very little effort instead of 10 struggling, squirming, cheating reps, and their max-pull-up numbers increased substantially.

This seems to bear out something Chad Waterbury has been suggesting for some time now--that reps done at full capacity--those first, picture-perfect ones that aren't even much of a struggle, the 'junk' reps we burn through to get to the ones that 'count', are actually of great benefit because we're firing on all cylinders.  About his training, Mohammed Ali was once quoted as saying "I don't start counting until it starts hurting;" Waterbury's theory points to a possible alternate theory:  that the reps stop counting when they start hurting.   

This is probably an overstatement:  I've done Waterbury's programs, and those suckers hurt, even if you're steering clear of failure, as he suggests.  Still, when it comes to increasing pull-up numbers, this system seems to work better than anything else I've ever tried.