I Was Chilling After A Nice Walk In The Saturday Sun

…when I felt like I was in the mood for some mindless fun. So I popped a DVD with some flick called Mindhunters. It starred LL Cool J, Christian Slater, Val Kilmer and two hot girls whose names I couldn’t remember. The movie was pure brainless b-movie/slasher fun, and I enjoyed every second of it, though I’m sure the director wouldn’t like me calling his masterpiece a B-movie. Anyway, you maybe asking yourself what this movie could have to do with getting insanely good at chin-ups and pull-ups. Well…

LL Cool J Was A Ripped Bad Ass In The Movie

In one of the scenes one guy was hanging off some bar (falling was not an option because the floor was flooded and the killer had rigged the water with electricity). LL came to the rescue, swinging, climbing and pulling himself up various ledges, bars and walls. And the first dude was waiting for him and hanging for dear life. Naturally, I thought to myself – if only this guy had gotten his pullups in check BEFORE getting himself in a life and death pullup bar situation. Now LL Cool J, on the other hand, was having a breeze because he always keep in shape.

Here is the tutorial this poor guy probably wished he HAD read lol:

The Perfect Pull-up and Chin-up

• Watch your grip. Make sure to grip the bar towards your fingers. Basically, it should rest on the soft part just below your fingers. Avoid pinching your skin there. Pull-ups will cause callouses but they will actually make the exercise easier. Pinching the skin, on the other hand, will cause you unnecessary pain.
• Pack your shoulders. Always start the chin-up from a dead hang position. From there the first thing to do is, with straight arms, to pull your shoulders down toward the body and pack them into your torso.
• Use your back. The pull-up or chin-up is primarily an exercise for your back muscles. Those are the lats – the muscles of your armpits. You will fail to get good if you can’t feel and use your lats. It’s just that the biceps is too small and too week, no matter how well developed, to allow you chin-up mastery. Here is quick drill to feel those muscles. Extend your arms forward and ask a buddy to exert upward pressure on your arm. Now, try to lower it in spite of his efforts. Feel those muscles working? Good – use them in the pull-ups.
• Cross your legs. The phenomenon called irradiation allows neighboring muscles to make each othe stronger when contracting harder. So by crossing and flexing your legs against each other, you become stronger.
• Bend the bar. By attempting to twist the pull-up bar downward (your left hand will twist counter-clockwise and your right hand will twist clockwise) you will achieve a greater contraction in your upper body.
• Squeeze your butt. Same as crossing your legs and gripping hard, squeezing the glutes will give you an instant strength boost.

[From left to right: sternum chinups, sternum pullups, wide grip pullups.]

Mix Up Your Pull-up Training

• Regular chin-ups – these are done with an underhand grip. Pull yourself up until your chin clears the bar. They are excellent for biceps development and for overloading the exercise using additional weight.
• Regular pull-ups – same as chin-ups, except done with your palms in an overhand grip. They are also excellent for overloading with additional weight using a belt, a backpack or a dumbbell between the legs. They target the biceps less and the upper back as well as the brachialis (muscle below the biceps) and brachioradialis (muscle on top of the forearm) more.
• Wide grip pull-ups – these target the arms less and the upper back more. They are useful for learning to use the back muscles for chin-ups and pull-ups.
• Sternum chin-ups/pull-ups – these are the same as the regular chin-ups and pull-ups, except that they are done until the bar touches the chest bone (sternum). Sternum chin-ups and pull-ups are harder, but they work the mid-back and rear deltoids more.

How Get Better At It

The way to get better is to practice often (3 or more times per week), do a relatively high volume of training (25-36 repetitions per workout is a great goal), use progressive overload, and focus on strength training repetition ranges (doing 3 reps with a weight with which you could do a total of 5 repetitions is good rule of thumb).

[Lat activation, or simply put using your back, and NOT your arms, is the key to pull-up greatness. Note how the shoulders go down and are packed into the body. Not using the lats - the armpit muscles properly, is the number one mistake people make on chin-ups.]

These Mistakes Sabotage Your Progress

• You are not using your back. If you don’t learn to use the back muscles to initiate the movement and do most of the work on chin-ups and pull-ups, you are never going to get good at them. The upper arms are simply a small muscle and cannot compete with the big and powerful muscles of the upper back.
• You are training to failure. When doing complex movements like this, always stop 1 or 2 repetitions short of failure. This means to do 8 reps when you are capable of doing 9 or 10. Training to failure is a viable tool when it comes to breaking down a muscle so it can recover and grow bigger and stronger. Pull-up and chin-up performance, however, comes down to learning to use your back and getting more efficient at it.
• You aren’t using full range of motion. If you don’t go all the way down on chin-ups and pull-ups, you won’t be able to powerfully activate the back muscles.

Your Weaknesses Are Killing Your Performance

You are as strong as the weakest muscle that takes part in the exercise:

• Train your grip. You won’t be good at pull-ups if you can’t stay on the bar long enough. You need a strong grip. Train by hanging off the bar for time with two arms (eventually try hanging off one arm). Barbell holds with heavy weights for time also will help.
• Develop your forearms. Training your forearms with wrist curls, reverse wrist curls, reverse bar curls and pinch gripping (holding two weight plates together and lifting them off with one hand) will also improve your grip, thus your chin-up performance.
• Strengthen the mid-back muscles. The mid back muscles are responsible for the hardest part of the movement – the finish. Strengthen them with dumbbell, barbell or cable rows.
• Strengthen your upper arms muscles. Your upper arm muscles – biceps and brachialis, are also responsible for the finishing part of the movement. Improve them with barbell and dumbbell curls and reverse curls (like the regular curls but with your hands on top of the bar).

[Here's me doing 16 pull-ups. Notice the grip and the full extension at the bottom.]

So there – use proper form, activate the back, train often, use low reps and progress in weight (either with a weight belt, a backpack with weight plates or a dumbbell between your feet) as soon as it gets easier and you will be on your way to chin-up mastery.

Insane Photo by Digital Sophia

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[BAM! You're dead.]

Small Increments Work Best

Weight training can induce this stress and so can other sports. The body reacts to this by restructuring in order to be better suited the next time the stress occurs. It is best however to allow ourselves to adapt easier by increasing the difficulty just a little bit at a time. So make sure to not be greedy and lift just a little bit more next time.

The Smaller the Working Weight on an Exercise, the Smaller the Progressive Overload Jump

This is kind of obvious but here goes. If you lift with the whole body – such as in deadlifts, you can get away with bigger increases in poundage. If you are training your biceps with barbell curls, you should use smaller increments because they constitute a bigger percentage of the total weight.

The Longer You’ve Been Training, the Harder It Is to Progress

You have to understand that the longer your training experience, the harder and slower you will progress. This is because the initial adaptation to the stress of an exercise program is a result of a drastic change. From no training to some training. No such change can ever happen again. From untrained to trained is the biggest jump you can make.

Sure you can train like there is no tomorrow in order to induce a bigger stress, but you will fail, because the body has limited capacity for adaptation.

Just Keep At It

Nothing will give bigger rewards than persistence and consistency. Just being there every week will make you more successful than any fancy technique or program. All programs work if you keep hammering. Don’t miss workouts. It goes without saying – if you miss scheduled training, you are sabotaging your progress.

Alternate Between Strength and Size

For best results, alternate between training for size and training for strength. The body is like an engine – when training for strength, you tweak and tune it to run faster. When training for size – you just build yourself a bigger engine that you can later tweak and tune again to run even faster.

When Training for Strength with Heavy Weights, It Is Easier to Progress on Sets

When training heavy, each new repetition is difficult. It is easier however to add another set. Like so:

Workout 1 – 3 sets of 3
Workout 2 – 4 sets of 3

When Training for Size, It Is Easier to Progress with Repetitions

Training for size is done with a moderate weight, so you can fatigue the muscle by focusing specifically on it. The sets are longer and it is easier just to add reps. Just like that:

Workout 1 – 10 reps, 8 reps, 8 reps
Workout 2 – 11 reps, 9 reps, 8 reps

Muscles Adapt Fast While Connective Tissues Adapt Slow

People who gain muscle mass fast with steroids sometimes end up injuring themselves. Their muscles are stronger, but the ligaments, joints and bones have to catch up first. When you have build some new size, you have to gradually allow your body to the new strength of the muscles

Measure Your Progress Objectively

Either execute the movements with perfect form or choose ones that you can’t cheat on – dead lifts, pullups, etc. There is of course place for some creative cheating. Just don’t fool yourself that you are progressing when in fact you are adjusting the exercise to make it easier.

Image: RossinaBossioB

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What is the purpose of training your muscles

Weight training is a kind of stress. When your muscles, as well as tendons, bones and internal secretion glands are exposed to the stress of resistance training, they fatigue and break down a bit. The organs and tissues subsequently recover and become stronger than before.

What is progressive overload

In order to get stronger, the body has to experience conditions that are increasingly more difficult. If month after month you just go for the pump with your 3 sets of 12 at 200 pounds, guess what will happen? Your body will not change. The simplest way would be to just add more weight to the bar on your bench presses. However there are other ways to make the training conditions harder.

[You don't want to be left out of the club when it comes to progressing on your goals, right?]

Ways to progress

The simplest way to progress is to do for example 3 to 5 reps or 8 to 12 and aim at hitting one more repetition the next time you are in the gym. For instance, 200 pound for 3 reps, next workout 200 pound for 4 reps, etc. Or if you go for the hypertrophy inducing rep range – 10 reps at 200 lbs, next workout 11 reps, you get my point. Add reps. Another way is to try to add weight to the bar or machine. Yet another way is to try to do more total reps (which means sets X reps)with the same weight. You can also try to finish the same workout in less time. These are all ways to make the conditions harder on your body.

How often can you progress

This depends mainly on how close you are to reaching your genetic potential. Beginners can and should strive to progress with each session, sometimes even daily. Intermediate trainers usually can increase the resistance once every 5 to 7 days. Advanced athletes are happy to improve once every 4-6 weeks. Olympic/Pro level trainees strive for annual progress or even plan their ascent in 4 year cycles for the Olympic games. You should strive to progress as often as possible for your condition. Trust me, you will save months and years of frustration in the gym if you focus on progress.

[I decided to share the video because I love it! The Beastie Boys were one of the first bands I really liked back in 8th grade and sabotaging reminded me of their hilarious video]

Image credit: elward-photography nickolette

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