Ippt The chinup: Training
Author: Jonathan Wong, Singapore Personal Trainer And Performance Expert
General Training Philosophy
Train the chin-up Often, with multiple variations, weights and rep ranges, but do not train to failure and let your body get “good” at the movement and efficient at it (because you train so often). This is also known as “greasing the groove” in this case it’s not a physical groove but rather a movement pattern in our nervous system.
There are 2 factors at work here. First we want to train as often as possible so the groove gets greased. But if we keep doing the same thing over and over we get over trained, nervous system fatigue, injured, muscle imbalances, and stagnate quickly.
The key is not to go out and do all other kinds of crazy exercises, rather the important thing to do is to do things “the same, but different”. That means instead of doing chin-ups, we will do pull-ups sometimes, which are the same movement but with a slightly different emphasis.
Sometimes we will do chin-ups with partner assistance, sometimes with added weights, sometimes we pull at different angles. All these are the “same” but “different”. It leads to progress with far smaller chance of stagnation or injury. This is the best of both worlds.
Personally I use a similar method through my own year round training program. I can do a 1 handed chin-up and a 2 handed chin-up with an additional 75kg hanging from my body.
This method also works for my clients who may be new to strength training. I had one client who was overweight at 90kg, and has never done a chin-up since his BMT days 8 years ago. But, in just 8 weeks, he can do 4. Training less than 3 hours per week TOTAL, but doing several sets of chin-ups several times per week (perhaps 10% of his training time spent on chin-ups).
Don’t worry. There will be a good chin-up programs given for guys of different abilities and goals.
Let’s talk about training more in detail.
You will need to do some specific training for weak body parts because they can hold you back from poor performance. You might have the strongest arm and back muscles in the world but weak hands and forearms can keep you from a good performance.
For your hands and forearms, I strongly recommend grippers and forearm rollers. Since you need a lot of static strength in them to “crush” the bar and hang on, train them the correct way. I would get a challenging gripper and do a few sets of 30-45 seconds each time after your chin-up workouts. I would also make my own roller and do a 3-4 sets at home while watching TV. In addition we will use a towel to build up chin-up grip strength.
Next we move on to the other common area of weakness (linked to posture again). This is the upper back. To do chin-ups and their variations correctly. The main problem many people have is the inability to get their shoulder blades pinched together and down.
This has been covered in the section on posture. Not only is the “down and back” position of the shoulder blades good for your posture, it also “links” your arm strongly to your torso so you get a stronger pulling effect (and also a shorter distance to pull to get your chin over the bar!).
Beginners, in the case of chin-ups, you are a beginner when you can do less than 1 chin-up!
Novice means 1-6 chin-ups
The beginner/novice programs focus on getting those first few chin-ups by doing exercises that build up individual portions of the chin-up movement.
Intermediates can do between 6-12 chin-ups
The intermediate program focuses on building endurance in the chin-up muscles as well as making the movement of pulling your body upward as efficient as possible in your body's nervous system. The complex computer that controls your muscles.
Advanced means 12 or more and I mean no swinging, no kicking, arms straightened, chin clearly over bar, perfect chin-ups.
The advanced program uses what is call conjugate periodization. A fancy name that means training all your physical attributes at the same time. This uses high, low and medium reps and weights to develop your chin-up potential to its max.
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