Doing chin-ups and pull-ups are a vital part of any resistance training program designed to increase or maintain muscle in the upper body. No better exercise exists to give you wide, powerful lats, and thick bulging biceps and forearms. Sometimes colloquially known as “upper body squats” pull-ups and chin-ups work most of your upper body and core pretty thoroughly. If you’re going to be putting in the effort to do this powerhouse of an exercise, it is worth taking the time to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.
There are a number of ways to make your pull-ups and chin-ups more effective. From addressing weak points and adding some assistance while you build strength, to enhancing your grip by the use of gloves and straps, changing up your hand position and the speed of your reps. There are a myriad of variables to tweak and adjust your pull-up workout to reap greater benefit from every rep.
So here’s some tips and things to consider to make your pull-ups and chin-ups more effective.
Don’t hang on the pull-up bar, keep your muscles tense.
The shoulder is a complex and potentially vulnerable joint. The connective tissue, such as tendons and ligaments, although very strong, are not meant to support all your body’s weight. So, it is important never to dead hang on the bar without keeping your muscles slightly contracted to prevent from ‘dangling’ by this connective tissue.
By continuing to keep the muscles bearing your weight, and not hanging by your tendons, you will increase your time under tension and will maximally stimulate and exhaust those lats, biceps, and forearms.
It can be tempting to hang and rest for a few moments while trying to summon up the strength for another few reps, but this can be a disaster waiting to happen. Shoulder injuries can totally derail your fitness progress, and possibly cause lasting pain and even require surgery. So, if you need to rest, hop down and wait a few seconds before grasping the bar again.
Use gloves
The forearms (read: grip strength) are typically the weak link for most trainees. Your lats are the biggest muscles in your upper body, and unlikely to tire before the much smaller biceps, and wrist flexors. So a common problem is that your hands will start to slip before you have exhausted your lats, or even biceps.
Any type of lifting gloves, or rubber gripped gloves will work to enhance your ability to hang on to the bar for more reps.
Another plus, gloves will also help protect your hands from the calluses which will inevitably form when you do a lot of pull-ups or chin-ups. Some people do not care about this, but for those who want to keep soft hands this is an additional benefit of using gloves.
Use straps
Straps are another solution that enhance your ability to perform additional pull-ups and chin-ups within a given set. If you have difficulty hanging on to the bar, straps that attach your hands to the bar are another way to enhance the intensity of your set and allow you to push further in training your lats and biceps.
Straps will cause your grip to weaken if you over rely on them, so do your first sets without them, and use them as needed in subsequent sets.
Use resistance bands
Resistance bands can be helpful for providing some assistance for those that cannot do many pull-ups or chin-ups. If you are just starting out and need to work your way up to sets of multiple repetitions, a band can be placed on the bar and looped around the knees or feet to provide upward assistance.
Using bands to make the first couple of sets a little easier is also a great way to warm up for a pull-up/chin-up workout.
As you get stronger, you can add resistance by attaching a band to a weight belt or looping it around your knees and anchoring it to a large weight plate or something which is fixed low to the ground.
The resistance curve of a band makes it a great choice for both assistance and resistance when doing pull-ups.
The resistance increases as the band is stretched, so when using bands for assistance the band is stretched at the bottom of the movement, where you’ll need the most help, and less as you pull closer to the bar.
When using bands for added resistance, the amount of resistance is less at the bottom, but increases as you move into the strong range at the top of the movement.
Use a spotter
If you’re new to pull-ups, or you have a training partner that you workout with, a spotter can help by pushing up on your knees or feet – just enough to help you perform full range reps. A spotter can also help you squeeze out a few more reps by providing you with just enough assistance to get through any sticking points.
Starting out with a spotter can help beginners build confidence as they learn the movement, build strength and find their ‘groove’ in this challenging exercise.
The safety factor is also important, as a spotter can help you keep strict form. By stopping you from swinging or coming down too fast, the spotter can help you get the most out of each set.
Use extra weight
Once you have mastered pull-ups, you’ll eventually need to add additional resistance to keep improving. This is especially true if you have lost weight as part of your fitness journey. Pounds lost means less weight for your pull-ups and chin-ups.
There are ways to add weight that are wearable, such as a weighted vest, ankle weights, or loading plates or gallons of water to a backpack.
If you prefer, you can hold a dumbbell or small weight plate between your legs for additional weight while you do pull-ups/chin-ups.
The best way to add weight to your pull-ups/chin-ups is to use a weight belt. Your gym will have these, or you can buy your own. The belt has a chain which hangs near your knees that larger plates can be attached to. This is the best option if you are very strong and need to add a larger amount of weight. It is well balanced, secure, and doesn’t provide a distraction by requiring you to exert extra energy or attention by holding it in any way.
Go Slow
Going through the motions on any exercise will lead to sloppy form and minimal results. Instead, it is important to go slow through your repetitions and get the most out of each rep. The negative (downward) portion is especially important for building muscle, so be sure to slowly lower yourself, keeping tension in the muscles the whole time.
Going too fast through your reps leads to ineffective sets and workouts, and should be avoided. Second up, 1-2 seconds down is a good cadence for pull-ups and chin-ups.
This is probably the most important of all of these tips. Slow, controlled reps will do much more good than a higher number of fast sloppy ones.
Extra Thick Bar
Using an extra thick bar to do pull-ups or chin-ups will make it an even more challenging exercise for your forearms.
If you use a homemade pull-up bar you could switch it out for a thicker piece of pipe or whatever. You could also do your chin-ups/pull-ups on another object such as a tree branch, ceiling beams, the crossbar on the swings at your local park… use your imagination. Even something like scaffolding could be used, just be careful and use some common sense in making sure it is secure and safe, and not so high that it could be unsafe to jump down.
If you don’t have anything appropriate to do them on, you can tightly tie a towel or barbell squat pad around your pull-up bar to increase its diameter.
The increased diameter will make it harder to hold on to and can push your grip strength and forearm development to a higher level.
Switch Grips (Hand Position)
This is kind of an obvious one, but changing up the position of your hands will change the way your muscles are trained. The emphasis on biceps, rear delts, outer lats and inner back is significantly different between overhand (pullups), underhand (chin-ups), close parallel, and wider and narrower variations of all of these.
Switch up your grip from time to time, or for several sets at a time within each workout to hit the muscles from different angles.
Use Rings
Ever see a really jacked male gymnast? Of course you have. This is partly because of the rings. Doing pullups on the rings is much more difficult because the rings are suspended, so your proprioceptive system has to work hard to keep your body stable. This makes it much harder to pull up on, but makes for a fantastic workout. This is most definitely an advanced exercise. The unstable nature of this exercise means that you will need to have mastered regular pull-ups and have developed a good base level of strength.
A suspended bar would have a similar effect but would largely reduce the need to stabilize yourself in the frontal plane of movement (side to side) making it easier than rings but still a marked increase in instability versus using a fixed bar.
It is important to track your progress with other metrics besides just weight and what you look like in the mirror. The scales will not tell the full story of what’s going on with your body composition. I highly recommend you track your body fat using a body fat monitor, and use a retractable tape measure to keep track of the size of your waist, hips, arms, and legs. This will give you a more complete picture of your progress.
Do Bent Arm Hangs
This is a static (stationary) version of a pull-up, and is incredible for building large, powerful biceps. Simply grasp the bar and pull up halfway, to where your elbows are bent at 90 degrees. Then hold yourself there for as long as you can. As you start to tire out and start lowering down, go as slowly as possible until your arms are completely extended.
Try adding one or two bent-arm hang at the end of every pull-up/chin-up workout, or even on days in between pull-up workouts.
Bent arm hangs are also a good way for beginners to build up to doing pull-ups if you are currently unable to perform this exercise. If you are extremely heavy you may need to lose weight before you can comfortably do these.
Keep track of your time (how long you can hang before extending your arms fully), and try to increase it each workout.
As always, be sure to go and get a checkup from your doctor before starting out doing pull-ups, chin-ups or any other new exercise problem to make sure you are healthy enought to work out.
