New York City’s trendiest workout hub isn’t your typical gym filled with high-tech equipment.
In the urban jungle of New York, residents have long transformed the city’s built environment into their personal fitness space, especially when it comes to doing pullups. From scaffolding to subway bars and even crosswalk lights, any structure strong enough to support them doubles as a bar for impromptu pullups.
This innovative exercise tradition isn’t a new phenomenon. However, it is increasingly dominated by women who are prominently showcasing their strength on social media. You’ll find them recording pullup sessions during a night out with friends, on their way to work, or even while enjoying a date.
As these captivating videos spread across the internet, they are amassing thousands of views and defying the outdated stereotype that pullups aren’t typically a women’s exercise.
Take, for instance, Paige Bullard, 36. Fresh from a calisthenics workout near Yankee Stadium, she boarded a jam-packed 5 train bustling with enthusiastic baseball fans, ready to demonstrate her pullup prowess.
One man grabbed the metal handrail and started doing pullups. Then another joined him. Then a third. A stranger — who had told Bullard earlier that she was in “the greatest shape ever” — urged her to join them, even offering to hold her bag. She declined.
Then the women started chiming in.
“If the girls want me to do it, I’ll do it,” she remembers thinking. “So then I went up there and did the 20 pullups.”
A professional athlete and founder of Bar Proof, a calisthenics and street workout event series, Bullard has amassed more than 150,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, where she shares snapshots of her workout sessions and community.
“A lot of men don’t expect us to be strong in that area. So when you bust out, like, 15, 20, they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t even do that.’”
Paige Bullard
Sprinkled among them are videos of her doing pullsups on crosswalk lights and tree branches in outfits suited more for a catwalk than a gym. The Brooklyn native has even done them on dates, typically with another calisthenics enthusiast.
“It works out,” she told The Post. “From the bar to the bar.”
“A lot of men don’t expect us to be strong in that area,” Bullard added. “So when you go up there and you bust out, like, 15, 20, they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t even do that.’”
Women, she said, are often just as shocked, but their surprise tends to turn into inspiration.
“I really do a lot of what I do for women,” said Bullard, noting that she hosts free weekly calisthenics sessions in the park for women. “I want to see women get more active and engaged in fitness overall, but especially calisthenics.”
“I just want them to know that you know we’re capable of doing a lot more than just some squats at the gym.”
The girls are getting their reps in
Yami Nevarez, 26, an Equinox coach, is one of the women Bullard inspired to do exactly that.
Nevarez had seen Bullard’s videos and attended one of her sessions at the beach in August 2025. The two quickly became friends, and Bullard began training with Nevarez, a calisthenics newbie who had yet to perform a pullup.
With their friend Felicia Waithe, they formed the Cali Puff Girls, an all-women calisthenics crew that trains together through friendly challenges and supportive sisterhood.
Less than a year later, Nevarez was doing pullups, muscleups and bar dips in a viral video on a scaffolding pole well above her petite, 5-foot frame.
“I’m just doing it for the girls who think that they can’t do it. I was once that girl … here I am now doing pullups anywhere and everywhere.”
Rose Joseph
“I just feel like that’s a certified New Yorker, getting on the scaffold and pulling yourself up,” she said. “Paige inspired me a lot, though. Seeing another woman being able to do things that people put limitations on — it’s very inspiring.”
That was her first time performing pullups on scaffolding, a feat she described as “a great feeling.” She did have one complaint, though: “Your hands get so dirty. You know, we’re just girls.”
Rose Joseph, 29, a project manager and fitness creator from Long Island, had also been seeing videos of women doing pullups across the city and was inspired to start documenting her own.
“Every time we be out and about in New York City, every time I see little poles — or, you know, maybe like a traffic light — I would at least try and get some pullups in” she said. “Like, the gym games don’t stop.”
Joseph achieved her first unassisted pullup in 2025 after trying for about two years.
“I’m just doing it for the girls who think that they can’t do it. I once thought that,” she said. “I was once that girl — until I just kept on going, and here I am now doing pullups anywhere and everywhere.”
Karen Modesto, a licensed daycare provider from Queens, came to pullups through weightlifting. While searching for exercise inspiration, she came across videos of women doing them.
Initially, Modesto wasn’t impressed. But after seeing captions claiming that only a small percentage of women could do pullups, she became determined to not be one of them.
“Wait a minute, I’m not going to be in that percentage who can’t do it,” the 39-year-old said. “I’m going to do a pullup. So that’s how I started.”
She now posts videos performing pullups throughout the city, including some alongside men.
“My body, my strength — everything has fully changed,” she said. “When you look at me doing a pullup, what you say to yourself is that is one strong woman.”
But how many women can actually do one?
There’s a viral sound on Instagram and TikTok of a group of unidentified men discussing how many unassisted pullups they believe the average woman can statistically perform.
“On average probably 1.5,” suggests one. “4?” guesses another. “Zero,” he answers.
Women have reclaimed the audio, pairing it with videos of themselves performing the exercise well past four times. But some of the captions accompanying those videos still repeat a similar claim: that only 1% to 5% of women can do one full, unassisted pullup.
The problem is that the statistic isn’t backed by reliable data. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be a reliable large-scale study establishing what percentage of women can perform an unassisted pullup.
“That ‘data’ seems to be pulled out of thin air,” said Lauren Colenso-Semple, an exercise physiologist and strength coach who goes by Dr. Lauren and specializes in female muscle physiology, training and nutrition.
The most famous controlled trial in this area is a 2003 study by exercise researchers at the University of Dayton, in which 17 college-aged women who could not do pullups trained three days a week for three months, practicing lifting exercises, modified pullups and aerobic conditioning.
The women increased their upper-body strength by 36% and lowered body fat by 2%. Yet only four were able to do a single pullup on test day.
The New York Times Magazine highlighted the study in a 2012 column titled “Why Women Can’t Do Pull-Ups.” But the study doesn’t necessarily prove women are inherently bad at performing the exercise.
According to Dr. Lauren, the women’s program was more of a full-body training program than one specifically designed to improve pullup strength through specific exercises. “Many of them aren’t targeting the back musculature at all,” she said.
She also noted that 12 weeks might not have been long enough, especially given the volume of the program.
How to get your first pullup
To build toward a pullup, Dr. Lauren recommends strengthening the back with row and pull movements, including dumbbell rows, bent-over barbell rows, lat pulldowns and seated cable rows, along with pullup movements such as negative pullups and banded, assisted pullups.
As for whether sex differences exist when it comes to strength, she pointed out that untrained men generally have more strength than untrained women, largely because the surge in testosterone that boys experience during puberty increases muscle mass.
But that doesn’t mean women are physiologically less capable of getting stronger.
“Once they start lifting weights, once they start training, we actually see very similar increases in both muscle size and strength, relative to the starting point,” said Dr. Lauren.
“So what that shows us is that, you know, there’s nothing about being a woman that makes you kind of inherently less capable of putting on muscle and strength. They just start with less.”