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Normal_Anomaly comments on How I changed my exercise habits - Less Wrong
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"Every day, with no excuses, I went to the gym and did fifty pull-downs on one of the machines."
This is not the most efficient means to get towards doing a pull-up. High reps with low weights activates different muscle fibers than low reps with high weight. I would recommend increasing the amount of weight and reducing the number of reps on your lat pulldown. You should also skip a day in between doing this exercise each time. You could do 50% of your body weight as a warm-up, then try 75% of your body weight and see how many reps you can do. If you manage more than 5, you don't have enough weight on there. Incorporate this into a circuit routine to minimize down time. A warm-up set followed by 3 sets of 3 reps is one way of doing this. By 3 reps, I mean your goal is to reach complete fatigue after only 3 reps. You should still try to complete as many reps as you can. Your circuit would include at least 3 other exercises in between that don't target your back so you have time to rest. On your skip day, just do cardio. Another thing to try is to use different variations of the lat pulldown, so you target as wide a variety of muscles as possible. Be careful about your form.
Thanks for the advice. I don't want to do alternating days, because doing the same thing every day makes it easier to have as a habit (for me, anyway). More weight with less reps/set and doing a circuit both make sense. I'm sort of combining weight maintenance and strength goals, and I should probably meet with someone who advises on these questions for a living instead of winging it.
Pavel Tstatsouline certainly does, and in Naked Warrior claims daily training, even more than once daily training, works as long as it is not done until failure. It is feasible to make people do pull-ups every time they exit the kitchen, but not until failure. The mainstream advice, which recommends 48 hours of rest, is based on training to failure. I think the difference is that the not-to-failure training is less like usual training and more like work, like digging with a shovel every day as a job.