A Wireman's Road to Chasing His Dream
■ Yan Tao, Liu Fangfang, Contributing Reporters, PLA Daily
"133, 134, 135… a brigade record!"
On the training ground in early summer, amid the shouts of his comrades, Private First Class Xiong Zhuocheng summoned every last ounce of strength to complete his final pull-up bar muscle-up (单杠卷身上), then dropped heavily to the ground. Though both arms were trembling uncontrollably and sweat was streaming down from the tips of his hair, his face broke into a brilliant, proud smile.
That night, lying in his bunk, the training scenes of the past ten months played through his mind like a film—
When he first began practicing the pull-up bar muscle-up, he could barely complete a single-digit count. Looking at his far-from-powerful arms and his dismal scores, Xiong Zhuocheng felt deeply discouraged.
Not long after, as specialized training got underway, he threw himself wholeheartedly into pole-climbing—the "stumbling block" for privates—as a wireman. To accelerate his progress, Squad Leader Wu Zhiqiang required him to train "without touching the ground": jumping from the ground, pushing off the pole, driving with force, climbing up to the top of a four-meter pole, dropping two meters, then climbing back up again. He would often train until his palms burned and stung, his arms ached and swelled, and his legs went weak, yet he still had to grit his teeth and push through. Gratifyingly, six months later his training scores broke into the top three among soldiers of the same year.
"There's a mass military skills competition coming up in the battalion soon—why not sign up?" one day, after pole-climbing training, Wu Zhiqiang suggested.
"I don't have any strong events. I'll pass."
Hearing this, Wu Zhiqiang frowned: "Your specialized training scores are outstanding—why can't you take a shot at the pull-up bar muscle-up?"
Seeing Xiong Zhuocheng's reluctant expression, Wu Zhiqiang pulled him to the training ground and started from scratch—teaching him how to grip the bar, first practicing the thigh-contact drill, then the bar-rotation drill. At first, unable to find the right contact point, he frequently bruised his inner thighs black and blue. But in a test half a month later, he managed to pull off 10 repetitions, and his misgivings evaporated.
As pull-up bar muscle-up training and pole-climbing training alternated more frequently, Xiong Zhuocheng noticed that specialized training and bar training seemed to share common ground: the gripping and driving motion of the hands tightly clasping the pole during climbing closely matched the gripping and driving force of the pull-up bar muscle-up; during the climb, when the body is suspended in mid-air, continuously tightening the core and maintaining body balance is precisely the key to the "abdominal curl and body linkage (卷腹发力、身体衔接)" in the pull-up bar muscle-up.
Rising and falling on the bar tempers the sinews and bones; climbing to the top of the pole forges the will. From 10 repetitions to 20, then breaking through 30, Xiong Zhuocheng grew ever more convinced of this intrinsic connection and continued to reinforce it. In early 2025, the battalion organized a mass military skills competition. At the examiner's command, the grip, abdominal curl, and bar rotation flowed in one unbroken sequence. Though slightly dizzy, the core control and upper-body strength honed through pole-climbing carried him to 46 repetitions, breaking the battalion record.
"This private is no ordinary soldier!" Watching Xiong Zhuocheng's performance, his comrades broke into exclamations of admiration. After he came off the bar, they noticed that the blisters on his palms had long since been worn open, with faint traces of blood visible. Squad Leader Wu Zhiqiang disinfected his hands with iodine, his heart aching for him. Xiong Zhuocheng just grinned: "Broke the record—no matter how hard it was, it was worth it!"
This unexpected gain gave Xiong Zhuocheng a surge of confidence, and he set his sights on the brigade military sports games. Learning that the best score in last year's pull-up bar muscle-up event was 118 repetitions, he proactively sought out the champion, Huang Pengyi, for guidance. "Don't fixate on spinning around repeatedly—train specifically with wrist curls, vertical curls, hanging leg raises, and arm strength…" Huang Pengyi held nothing back.
Back on the training ground, Xiong Zhuocheng launched a specialized training regimen: he hammered his core strength with weighted five-kilogram bent-arm hang leg raises, reinforced his forearm muscle groups with 20 sets each of dumbbell curls and wrist curls, and even added a few sets of push-ups after coming off duty in the evenings. One month later his score broke through 60, but there was still a considerable gap to close before reaching his target.
Through consulting specialized materials and videos, he added new training content: push-ups performed with wide-arm, narrow-arm, and normal-arm variations, 20 repetitions of each, 10 sets per day, while also practicing hanging with sandbags strapped to his legs.
"After that, every small step forward was a completely new challenge!" Xiong Zhuocheng reflected with deep feeling when recalling the breakthrough from 80 to 100 repetitions.
"Strapping a dumbbell around your waist and doing hanging leg raises on the bar can improve arm endurance and core endurance." One day, after coming across a fitness blogger's video, Xiong Zhuocheng was thrilled. He immediately found a backpack, loaded it with dumbbell plates, put it on, and began training. After a period of time, his pull-up bar muscle-up count broke through 112, and his pole-climbing score also jumped to first place in the entire battalion.
Every drop of sweat on the training ground is a stepping stone on the road to the extreme. To keep improving his scores, Xiong Zhuocheng turned his attention to more professional training methods in the field and asked a coach to correct his technique. After the corrections, his leg-raise and head-tilt movements became more coordinated, and he exerted less effort when pulling on the bar. Two months later, he finally surpassed the previous mark, reaching 135 repetitions—and so came the scene described at the opening.
All silent effort will ultimately become the foundation of courage to break through oneself. Today, Xiong Zhuocheng has become a training backbone in his company, motivating more comrades to strengthen their capabilities from their own posts.