Chin Up, Old Chap
The chin-up deserves your respect. The ability to pull yourself up from a full hang is not just for superheroes and action stars. It’s for anyone who wants to rank well in the context of relative strength, function and general fitness. Being better-equipped to battle super villains is just a bonus.
While bodyweight exercises are a great demonstration of functional strength, they also offer a challenge that free weights do not: there’s no smooth ramp up. And unless you’ve got enough room in your cargo pants for a whole lot of helium, you’re going to need to make some tweaks.
Just to be clear, a chin-up is where you pull ourselves up with your palms facing yourself. A pull-up switches this hand position. And while the concepts in this article will just as easily pertain to either version, the palms-in version is a little more attainable and should generally serve as a pre-requisite to the palms-out version. Naturally, there are also many variations that are easier to perform. However, making things easier and taking you closer to your goal are not always the same thing. That’s why you need three essential things:
1. The right exercises
2. The right progression
3. The right approach
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Clean Up the Weak Links
Don’t move. Not one inch. Now, take a look at your posture. Are your shoulders rounded forward? If so, the odds are pretty good that your external rotators (the muscles responsible for bringing your shoulders back) are relatively weak. You’re going to need those in order to chin. How about this: squeeze your shoulder blades back and drop them down. Did that require more than a split-second of conscious effort? Could you actually feel your lats or the muscles around the bottom of your shoulder blades contract? If not, that tells us something too.
Postural issues are going to interfere with your ability to chin. That’s why we’re going to address them up front. After all, if it’s something you can’t do seated at your computer, it’s something you won’t be able to do on the fly during a complex, resisted movement. I’m sure that there’s an exception to the rule out there somewhere but I’m also sure that you’re not it.
Here is a short list of exercises that should be performed right after your warm-up and always before your actual lifts. This is far from exhaustive but will get you off on the right foot:
- YTWL
- Reach, roll and lift
- Band pull-aparts
- Scapular push-ups
- Reverse shrugs
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Cut to the Core
Have you ever carried a sleeping child? Wrestled another person? Gotten rid of a dead body? The lesson you probably learned was this: a relaxed body is far more difficult to pick up than a tense one. That and who your real friends are. The point is that if you’re trying to pick your own body up, it makes sense to keep things tight. Developing proper core strength is going to a go a long way.
Your need for proper core strength is also what makes the lat-pulldown a poor choice for functional carry-over. It may share a lot in common with a chin-up but it won’t equip you for the type of core tension you’ll ultimately need.
News flash: your central nervous system (CNS) doesn’t like it when you thrash your lumbar spine around like an alligator with a fresh victim. In addition to the pain you might experience, your CNS may actually decrease neural drive to some of the muscles required for your activity. This is a fancy way of saying that you’ll get weaker during the movement. This is a very good example of why getting strong starts with your core.
The following core exercises will spare your spine and improve your chins:
- Plank
- Plank on stability ball
- Stirring the pot
- Stability ball roll-out
- Double leg lowering
- Reverse crunch
- L-holds
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More Chins than Chinatown
One of the reasons I wrote this article was to give you a sense of progression. This isn’t an arbitrary ritual that you repeat every day until you can miraculously perform a chin-up. It has a beginning, middle and end. Even if you’re light years away from actually reaching your goal, I still want you to be clear on how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go. That’s why I’ve put together a list of chin-up variations, beginning with the easiest and ending with your ultimate destination. Your job is to move yourself forward along the continuum.
Take a look at the list of exercises below. You will go as far down the list as you can with something that you’re able to perform at least six repetitions with. Six good repetitions. Six repetitions that won’t embarrass you when people watch the video on YouTube. That will be your starting point.
Single-arm pulldown from a tall kneel
This is a more functional version of the standard seated pulldown that will work to address left-to-right imbalances. Your job is to lock down your core in a neutral (natural) position and not allow your spine to move during any part of the lift. Heaving your body around has no place here.
- Chin-up from sitting position
This is a great way to perform a chin-up with less than your own bodyweight. By positioning the bar close to the ground, you will be able to go through the motions fairly accurately but with less than your bodyweight.
This is not to be confused with an inverted row. While the two exercises are similar, the chin-up from seated position requires you to keep your torso as vertical as possible – to hang off the bar, as opposed to squeezing the glutes and keeping the hips forward. Some people find it hard not to “help” by bringing their butt off the ground. Just let everything drop. Having something under your legs that can slide around with you may help.
- Band-assisted chin-ups
Accommodating resistance is a beautiful thing. The toughest part of the chin-up (i.e. the bottom) is where you’ll get the most assistance from a band. You’re also able to make measurable progress via different band strengths. I recommend Super Bands but anything that won’t break and/or maim you is ideal.
- Negative chin with a pull
A negative chin (where you cheat to get up and lower yourself with control) is one of the most commonly prescribed exercises for those who can’t perform a strict chin-up. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most misused. To earn the right to perform this variation, you must be able to lower yourself with control over three seconds. It’s not enough to just drop either. You need to pause at the bottom and try to pull yourself back up. The same muscles you would use to perform a chin from the bottom must be engaged. Whether you actually move or not is unimportant but whether you try is.
The cadence is: three seconds down, a one second active pause at the bottom (where you engage the same muscles you’d use to come up), a jump or step up into position and a one second hold at the top. Anyone can do this, but few people can do this well. So, if your form is sloppy, then you’re not ready for this variation yet.
- THE CHIN UP
Progress from here on in can be made by improving form, adding weight, increasing repetitions, upping the speed of your pull, slowing down your negative, decreasing your rest period, and so on. The sky is the limit.
Progressing Within Individual Exercises
- Single-arm pulldown from a tall kneel
This will be the easiest exercise to measure progress in, since weights instead of movement will be used to quantify things. Pulling down 70-80% of your bodyweight (with one arm) is a good goal to shoot for before moving on to the next variation. If there is a significant difference between your left and right sides, you will want to regularly return to this lift even if you’re capable of other variations.
- Chin-up from sitting position
Your ability to perform quality reps from a low position will be your first goal. Once you can achieve this, progressively increase the height of the bar.
- Band-assisted chin-ups
Since bands come in different widths, progress will come by way of climbing your way toward increasingly narrow bands.
- Negative chin with a pull
Your weight will remain constant but the speed of your negative can decrease. Don’t be afraid to count out loud.
You may want to use this exercise in conjunction with band-assisted chins, i.e. adding time to the negative before progressing to the next band width.
- THE CHIN UP
Before you begin adding weight, take a good, hard look at your form. Are you able to keep your spine locked into position? Are you getting complete range of motion? Are you getting enough reps in? No? You may need to take a step back, increase your rest periods or even take a week
off. Yes? Freakin’ good for you. Onto the next challenge!
A little help
Don’t let their grunting and handlebar moustaches fool you; powerlifters are smart. They know – perhaps better than anyone else – how to get stronger at a single lift. While you don’t (and probably shouldn’t) take everything they do to heart, there’s one lesson you should definitely pay attention to: the difference between a primary lift and an assistance lift.
We’ve already addressed your primary lift, i.e. getting you as close to a strict chin-up as possible. These are the resistance exercises that come first. Your assistance exercises may look similar but they have these important differences:
- They emphasize strength-endurance, as opposed to maximal strength
- They emphasize unilateral work to help prevent imbalances
- They isolate weak links (which may mean single-joint work, but not nearly as often as you might think)
I recommend that you emphasize unilateral (one-sided) movements for your assistance exercises. Any row variation (cable or dumbbell will generally serve you well). If you want a place to work on the gun show this will also be it. Rep ranges should differ from those of your primary exercises. Working in the 12-20 rep range will generally serve you best.
Maximize Your Relative Strength
Let’s say that we have two guys of equal muscle mass and strength. One is 175 lbs. and can perform five bodyweight chin-ups. The other is 205 lbs. but can’t perform a single one. What’s the difference? About 30 lbs. of fat.
Without doing anything but shedding that extra insulation, the second man can increase his functional performance and the amount of strength he has relative to body mass.
While many guys simply want to get as muscular as possible, most athletes don’t. Athletes need every single ounce to count – especially those who work within weight classes, such as fighters. Their job is to generate as much force per lb. as they possibly can. For athletes, the first option is often to drop what they need the least (AKA fat). By changing nothing else, they up their relative strength. If athletic performance is one of your priorities, you should do the same.
But let’s say that you don’t care about fat-loss. Your primary goal is to master the chin-up and that’s that. It will still take some time for you to develop the strength and function to do so. Maximizing fat-loss while you chip away at the other parts of the equation will only speed up your progress.
Let yourself rest
I haven’t factored in specific de-loading periods because life takes care of that for most people. However, suffice it to say that if you’ve been grinding hard for three consecutive weeks, your goals will be best served by taking it easy for a week. How easy? Downright lazy. Either half the weight or half the total volume you’ve been using.
Putting it all together
I didn’t want to write you a program dedicated to the chin-up since you’ve probably got other training goals on your plate. However, I did want to provide you with a structure that you can integrate into whatever you’re doing. In short, you will:
- Do some clean-up work
Practice moving well with little-to-no weight. Your body will thank you
- Do some core work
A weak core may be holding you back from functional performance
- Train your primary lifts
Order your lifts in the order of importance they have to you
- Train your assistance lifts
Find your weak links and make them stronger
- Trim the fat
Get leaner while you accomplish all of the above
Progressing (the short-term)
As I mentioned above, we’re going to shoot for six clean reps as a minimum standard for each phase. You’re going to want to attack the same exercise with the same degree of difficulty until you reach eight reps. When you reach that goal, it will be time to move you forward. There are lots of ways to increase resistance within the same exercise. You might modify weight, band thickness, bar height, etc. Once you’ve re-adjusted, you’ll start at six and work your way back up to eight.
Progressing (the long-term)
Since we don’t want you to plateau, changing exercises every 3-6 weeks (depending on how frequently you train) will help. You may be wondering what happens if you haven’t progressed to the next exercise on the list. The answer is this: don’t be afraid to move backwards. Every time you re-visit a stage, you will be stronger than you were before. Sometimes you’ll even be able to jump forward and skip one of the exercises. The order is not written in stone. Experiment a bit.
Epilogue
You don’t have to turn your exercise program upside down to get better at chin-ups. You just need to incorporate some structure, some consistency and a plan that charts the distance between where you are and where you want to be.
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