Health and fitness are on many minds. As boomers age and Gen Xers begin to hit their 30s, they realize that unless they do something to take care of themselves physically, they won’t be able to do the things they’ve taken for granted. Getting fitter doesn’t have to mean joining a gym or buying a bunch of weights or machines. For the most part, you can get a good workout using just your body weight and things around the house. An exception is back exercises. To get a decent back workout, you need to buy a pull up bar that can be mounted on a door. If anyone can suggest any exercises to complement the ones I’m detailing, please let me know.

Pull-ups are one of the most effective back exercises out there. When I researched back exercises, experts often cited pull-ups as an integral part of the workout. Many pieces of equipment in a gym simulate the movement of a pull-up, but have the advantage of using smaller weights, which makes them easier to do. So how can we fix that problem at home?

The easiest solution is to place the pull-up bar in the lower positions of the entrance. By placing the bar at chin height, you can use your legs to give you the support you need to do a successful rep. Use as much or as little leg strength as you like. As you gain strength over time, you may want to raise or lower the bar. Either one can join the challenge. Let me explain.

Raising the bar is self explanatory. Once you have the bar where you can barely reach it, you will be using your entire body weight for the exercise. This is not easy. A fitness test to get into the Coast Guard only requires men to be able to do three pull-ups. (An alternate name for this exercise is chin up. If you have a double chin, a rep only counts once.) Keep that in mind while doing pull-ups. They are a challenge.

To make a challenge less strenuous, lower the bar. If you lower the bar to about the three-foot height level, you can do what is essentially an inverted push-up. Try to keep your back and legs in a rigid straight line and pull yourself up towards the bar. To make this easier, you can rest your butt on the floor or sit on one. That takes a percentage of the weight off your lift. When you feel comfortable with that, raise the height of the bar. You can gradually increase the height as you get stronger, or you can keep the height low. Don’t try too hard. Slow and steady wins the race.

As an alternative to a pull-up bar, you could lie under a table and grab the edge of the table to do a modified floor pull-up. You have to have pretty good hand strength for that, but I like to include non-team alternatives.

To change these exercises up a bit, you can grip the bar in different ways. You can have your palms facing you or facing away. Doing a pull-up with your palms facing you engages your biceps more, facing away engages your back more. You can also have your hands shoulder-width apart, narrower, or wider. Do what feels most comfortable to you, but experiment with different grips from time to time.