1.How to get your first chin-up: The Foundation
2.How to get your first chin-up: The Method
3. How to get your first chin-up: The Program
In this three-part series we are going to look at how to finally get that goal of hitting your first chin-up . This goal can for both men and women and something that a lot of the clients we have at Fortitude Performance aim for long-term. Being able to do a strict CU can be a pretty impressive thing and shows a person that is not just “gym” strong they are capable all over.
The biggest part of mastering the movement actually comes from how you approach it from the beginning and the foundations you lay at each part. This is something that will take time and patience and require you to be meticulous with form and not pushing things to far ahead too quickly.
So there are going to be three parts to our series
1. The Foundation: Using your back properly
2. The Method: Progressively Overload your chin-up/pull-up
3. The Program: Programming long-term improvement of your chin-up/pull-up
I hope that you noticed that the very first part before anything else was actually using your back muscles properly. The more muscle you are able to use for this movement it stands to reason that the easier the process will be over time.
This first part will assume several things that you have access to a gym, you are not currently injured (if so please go to a physio to provide clearance) and that you currently consistent with your program.
Aiming for a goal of achieving body weight CH is a good goal, however the bigger movements such as squat, bench and dead lift will help this goal even more by adding to your overall strength and muscle. So that is our introduction covered and lets head into the first part of our series
First Chin-Up – The Foundation
USING YOUR BACK CORRECTLY
Initially I think that people can get good use out of the lat pull down as you remain in a fixed position and there are less stability demands. Some of the main points when using the lat pull down are
1.Complete the movement smoothly and slowly
We want to make each weight that we use for the lat pull down as hard as possible before we go up. Minimizing things such as momentum and shortening the range of motion must be avoided to get the most out of the pull down. One really good tip that I got from coach Shannon Green was to really emphasise that full hang position by using your back muscles such as the mid traps and lower traps to emphasise bringing your scapula together.
2.Use different grips
When doing your training for your first chin-up at the beginning you want to become pretty familiar with the grip you are going to use for it which is call “supinated” on the lat pull down. That said though you don’t want to limit yourself just to this grip as you will still gain benefit through gaining strength in the different hand positions. Some of the common hand positions for your lat pull down are
Supinated Pull down – Palms towards you
Pronated Pull down – Palms away from you
Neutral/ V-Bar Pull down – Palms facing in to each other
3.Good scapula control
When training your back we need to have control of our scapula’s (shoulder blades) to make sure that we are engaging all of the muscles that are available to us. It is a bit of a myth that just because you are doing a chin-up all of the good form you developed on the lat pull down should be thrown out. The same movements and engagement of muscles should occur even you are doing a chin-up as it will allow you to practice the most efficient technique and the one which will let you build over time.
Here is a video we shot which goes over all of these concepts and will help to give a clearer picture for you
The Foundation – Using Your Back Correctly (Video)
Building a good base for your back over time is actually just a good idea in general as having a strong back with muscle will carry over to helping with the bigger lifts and helping you lift for longer and staying injury free.
In our next article we will look at some of the methods that we use to build up to our first chin-up with some more specific exercises.
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