Improve Your Chinups
“I suck at chinups or I can’t do a chinup (or insert your exercise you can’t do)”. This is one of those exercises that people often say they CAN’T do but wish they could do. They want a specific exercise that will all of the sudden make them start banging out chinups or some new supplement that will give them new, beast like strength. They ask the question, “what can I do to improve my chinups”?…… They pause for the answer….. I say, “do chinups”…. They continue to pause with glazed over eyes…. I say nothing because I answered the question correctly…. They say, “but I need something to improve my chinups”…. Again I say, “do chinups”…. Their pause turns to a frustrated look so I say “Okay, do you do chinups”? They say, “no, I just told you I suck at them”. I say, “you can’t expect to be good at something you don’t do”.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that. If you want to be better at something, practice it. If you have had a chance to read Dan John, Pavel T, and all the way back to Arthur Saxon, you will see some commonalities in improving strength. PRACTICE STRENGTH. Strength can be looked at as a skill like anything else. So, with our topic on hand being chinups, simply practice your chinups 5 days a week. Think about this. If you wanted to improve a skill, say shooting a basketball or throwing a baseball, you wouldn’t shoot or throw the ball until the ball became too heavy to hold, causing your muscles to become so sore that you could not practice again for 5-7 days. Instead, you would show up fresh, practice shooting or throwing technique for a bit, leave fresh and repeat tomorrow. Three rules here:
1. Don’t max out
2. Don’t train to failure
3. Don’t miss a rep
This is where that under-rated, under-used thing called “common sense” needs to be utilized. So once again, the rules are:
1. Don’t max out
2. Don’t train to failure
3. Don’t miss a rep
A side rule…. Keep your reps low. If your goal is to improve your strength, which it is, because I chose the topic and this is my blog, the reps MUST stay low (5 and under). HIGH REPS DO NOT IMPROVE STRENGTH.
If, after 2-3 weeks, you still suck at chinups, it usually means one of these things:
1. You have been maxing out
2. You are training to failure
3. You are missing reps
Seriously, don’t overlook this. Do chinups 5 days per week, follow the rules, keep the reps low, always be fresh, and change the number of total reps you do per day (some days do less, some days do more).
For those of you who CAN’T do one chinup… This is where superbands come in:
And if you are a female that believes females can’t do chinups, have a look at this:
DN
