- So you wanna learn how to do a pull-up.
Well, in this video,
I'm gonna teach you the critical exercise
that most people leave out of their training
that prevents them from ever being able to master
a proper chest to bar pull-up.
And stick around to the end
because I'm also gonna teach you
how to progress from the beginner versions of this
right to the advanced progressions.
All that and more, coming up.
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how to move instead of just exercise
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- Now the number one thing
that people miss when doing a pull-up
is learning how to depress the scapula.
So if you look at my shoulder blades here,
that is called scapula depression.
So that's scapula elevation, scapula depression.
And what most people are doing when they do a pull-up
is that their shoulders are elevated
and they're pulling from here.
It's all arms, there's very little recruitment of the lat
and of the muscles in the back that control the scapula.
So what we wanna do, if you wanna be able to do
a chest to bar pull-up which is a proper pull-up, like this,
then you need to understand how to control your scapula
so that you can depress it down like this and the way
we do that is through what we call scap pull-ins.
So I'm gonna grab onto the bar like this,
pull down, hold for three seconds, and relax.
And then again, up, one, two, three, relax.
One, two, three, and what you want to do,
you wanna really control that movement,
you don't want to see any jerking around.
So we wanna come up with strength, hold for three seconds,
and then down with control.
Pull as high as you can possible go,
never let your elbows bend.
You are not trying to pull with your arms.
If your elbows bend at all, you're doing it wrong.
Now as I promised you as well at the start of the video,
I told you guys how you can progress
from a beginner variation to an advanced variation.
For the beginner variation, we're gonna come over here.
We're gonna use the gymnastic strings,
doesn't really matter what we're using
if it's the gymnastic strings or a chin-up bar
but the only reason I've gone here
is because of the height of the gymnastic strings
allows me to get my feet on the ground.
So for a beginning progression,
I'm gonna have my feet on the ground like this,
I'm gonna pull up, hold for three seconds, and back down.
It is critical that you can pull up all the way
and hold yourself.
We don't wanna see this, that's not enough.
You need to be able to get, look at my shoulder blades.
You need to be able to get full depression in the scapula
and then if we wanna go to the more advanced variations,
if we come back to the chin-up bar over here,
when you get good enough, you wanna be able to do 10 reps
of the bar lateral scap pull-ins,
so bar lateral means both arms together,
before you even try this
and then from here, we're gonna do a single arm.
Okay?
So what I'm looking for there
is that my shoulders get completely level to the ground
when I do that.
And I wanna not only depress the scapula but retract it
so depression like this,
retraction pulling into the spine like that.
Once you can do 10 reps of the bilateral scap pull-ins,
then you can progress to doing the single arm one
with your feet on the ground or you can do finger assisted.
So you can grab on like this with two fingers or one finger
and do the movement like that
so you're just helping a little bit
and then you'll eventually be able to do it with one arm.
Master those movements and your pull-up
is gonna go through the roof, literally.
I hope you enjoyed that video.
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