Do Pull-Ups Burn Fat or Help with Weight Loss? (The Answer)

Pull-ups activate abdominal muscles as they are constantly engaged to prevent the body from swinging while vertically moving up and down.

A study from 2018 revealed abs are the most engaged muscles throughout the pull-up motion; in the execution of a proper pull-up, your abs must stay active during both concentric and eccentric movement [1].

Pull-ups aren't ab-isolation exercises, but to perform them correctly, you should try isolating your core and let abs do the most of the job.

As my clients became used to pull-ups and started to miss the sore abs feeling, we did an 'upgraded' variation that loaded more tension to this muscle group and performed the L-pull-ups.

The revamp form is almost the same - catching the pull-up bar with an overhand grip shoulder-width apart.

The main difference is bringing your legs in front of you without bending your knees with legs parallel to the floor and body forming an L-shape. 

This way, abdominal muscles will have additional work, further activating the lower abdominal muscles and helping burn more calories.

How many calories you will burn doing this pull-up bar exercise depends on your body weight, muscle mass, and intensity.

Pull-ups are a compound movement like many other bodyweight exercises, so they activate more muscle groups requiring more calories.

For example, if you have 155 pounds, you will burn around 4.5 calories while performing a moderate-intensity pull-up, and if the intensity is dynamic, you will burn about six calories [2].

It's not the most effective exercise for fat burning, but you should remember that weight training has a long-term effect since building muscle helps raise daily energy expenditure, which adds up over the long term, and it also improves overall metabolism.

To lose one pound of body fat, you must burn a surplus of 3,500 calories, and Harvard Health publication recommends burning around 250 calories through exercises daily to get to your healthy weight [3].

As far as the results of my testing go, pull-ups did help burn some additional fat for my clients, especially visceral fat around the abdomen, but still, they are not as effective as cardio exercises or those explicitly designed for losing weight.

Exercises you can combine with pull-ups to burn fat could be high-intensity interval training (HIIT), simple pull-up bar workout variations, or cardio for weight loss.

Pull-up bar workout variations may include leg lifts, one leg lift, windscreen wiper, toes to bar, L-sliders, or hanging crunches.

Also, you can, from time to time, execute chin-ups or push-ups for stomach fat loss as other exercise combinations to burn calories effectively and lower the same muscle group tension.

If you are in good shape and love HIIT, you can try variations like burpee pull-ups where all muscle groups are engaged for effective weight loss.

But if your goal is solely to lose weight, the most effective routine to reduce belly fat is to combine strength exercises with a cardio workout.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity each week combined with at least two days of strength training to lose fat efficiently [4].