What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
The Pull Up or the Chin Up?
Which one's better?
Well, how about we cover them both and talk about everything we need to know about these
2 exercises.
Right off the bat understanding the difference between the 2 is critically important.
When we're talking about our Pull Ups, we're talking about an overhand grip up here on
the bar.
And when we're talking about a Chin Up, the hands are facing us this way.
Now, it doesn't matter which exercise you do.
We're not trying to call one out versus the other.
There are some common things that are great about both of these exercises.
First and foremost, they're recognized as the king of the bodyweight exercises.
And some will even argue that they're the king of the upper body exercise when you weight
them.
Number 2.
It's an incredible back and core stabilizer.
We've talked about it so many times.
As a matter of fact in one of our most recent videos, how important the lats are to stabilize
the body for the bigger lift
so that you can start to lift more on your Deadlifts, in your Squats, on your Bent Rows.
Thirdly, it's a great indicator of your body composition and where you're sitting at the
moment.
Big guys can struggle doing Pull Ups, but that's usually big, fat guys.
Big, muscular guys can do Pull Ups.
They really can.
It doesn't matter that they're pulling a lot more weight, proportionally, they should be
strong enough to be able to handle that.
I've got 250 pound athletes that can do Muscle Ups, let alone Pull Ups.
So we have to understand that if we are big and struggling with our Pull Ups,
we might want to start looking at our body comp and working on reducing all that excess
body fat.
Alright now, if you want to start getting into the 'one versus the other', we really
can do this very simply.
We have to break down the exercise into the motions that we can understand and relate
them to so we know what's going on.
When we look at a Pull Up, again, I talked about, we have a hands over, an overhand grip.
Now whether that's thumbless or whether the thumbs are wrapped around the bar, that's
more of a technique thing.
I find that if we leave the thumb off the bar, we now have our hands act as hooks
and we can initiate the pull from our lat's more where we can actually take advantage
of the strength of those big muscles.
And then we know on the underhand grip here for a Chin Up, that we're getting the added
benefit of our biceps to actually contribute to the exercise as well.
So, when people say, 'Which is better?', it's not which is better.
One sort of hits the biceps preferentially whereas the other one, if done right, will
hit the lats preferentially.
So it looks, it's more about, 'What is the focus of your training at the moment?'
and it should always be both.
You should always be doing both Pull Ups AND Chin Ups in your workouts, but it goes beyond
that.
We have narrow-grip overhand.
We have wide-grip overhand.
We have elbows in line with our body.
We have elbows in front of us, right.
We have, again, a narrow-grip Chin Up.
What are the differences between those?
Well, guys, it all comes down to understanding the contributions of the biceps to the exercise.
So, what I always like to do is show you how to do it with dumbbells.
If you were to take a pair of dumbbells here, right.
We know that one of the easier ways to do Curls, we have a regular underhand Curl, ok.
This is a Chin Up.
That position there is a Chin Up.
We have the added advantage of being able to pull with our biceps.
Ok, great.
Now, we know we can go this way to a Hammer Curl.
Well, Hammer Curls are even easier than the Underhand Chin Up.
Why?
Because we get another advantage of our brachialis muscle that contributes so that we have an
even better strength advantage here that allows us to pull.
So, neutral grip is even easier than an under-grip Chin Up.
And then we put ourselves in this Pull Up position and we're out there.
Basically, our hands and arms are way out to the side.
Try to take a dumbbell out here all the way out to the side and curl up.
And they become so much harder because I've basically taken the bicep and put it at a
mechanical disadvantage.
So, when we come out here, that's what's happening.
But you'll see that guys will still cheat in their Pull Ups.
They cheat by taking their arms and creeping them more and more and more forward.
See, if you want to do a straight Pull Up, guys, make sure those elbows are right in
line with your body pointing towards you.
Now, when I go up to the bar as I show you here, you can see that I'm maximally working
my back.
I'm maximally working my lower traps to help stabilize and drive my body up to the bar.
I don't really have much contribution from our arms.
But if I go into this forward position here, you can see that basically all I'm doing as
I do this Pull Up is, I'm involving those biceps and that Hammer Curl help again.
So it's supposed to be a little bit easier, but is it more effective?
No, not if you're trying to maximize the strength of your back.
Again, now we move into the Chin Ups and the same thing.
We know that getting the arms and elbows in front of us is going to really make it easier.
And the biceps are at a great mechanical advantage to contribute to that.
So, again, that exercise becomes easier.
Back to the overhand.
Get your hands way out wide and try to pull down.
You're not getting nearly as much elbow flexion as you are when you come in here.
So, again, limiting the contribution of those upper arm muscles to the move.
Ok, so whichever version of this exercise you decide to do, your Chin Ups or your Pull
Ups,
you've got to figure out where you're at strength wise and figure out where you can go from
there to make sure you're getting the most out of it.
I know that some guys can bang out Pull Ups or Chin Ups all day long and others struggle
to do even a single one.
So let's start on the low end.
If you're one of those guys that can't do a single rep, you've got to start somewhere,
right.
And the first thing that I always recommend is starting with Inverted Rows.
You're putting the position of your body against gravity,
a little bit more favorably than you would with a Pull Up, where you have to pull your
entire bodyweight directly against the force of gravity.
Here we have the ability to put our feet flat on the ground to unweight our body a little
bit.
And start training our back to be able to pull us against the force of gravity.
Pull your own bodyweight.
It's a great starting point.
But from there you can transition, if you have access to, what I'm showing you here,
a Kneeling Lat Pulldown.
Again, we can control the amount of weight that we're pulling here, so we're not pulling
full bodyweight here.
We're using a percentage of our bodyweight.
But we're getting ourselves in a position where we have to rely on core stability here
to keep our body upright,
we can control the position of the elbows, as I've said, we don't have to have them float
forward, we can keep them back in line.
And it really allows us to move our weight up to where we can handle.
But once you're ready to hit the bar, you hit the bar first with your eccentric only
reps.
Why is that?
Because we know the eccentrically you're going to be stronger than you are isometrically.
At that point, when we're able to control a 5 to 6 second descent on multiple reps,
then we go into just a basic isometric.
We pull ourselves up to the bar and hold for at least 10 seconds and make sure that our
chin stays above.
When we feel that we've mastered all those levels, we then can break out the assisted
band.
Step into the band, come up to the bar and unweight some of your body.
But now again, you're unweighting some of your body in a real pulp environment, different
than you were on the Lat Pulldown.
You work up here until you can manage multiple reps, and then if you want to try to start
getting yourself out of the band and attempting full Pull Ups, you can do that.
Now on the opposite side of the spectrum, you should be able to pull up a lot of damn
weight, Why do I say that?
Because you want to be balanced, front to back.
It's not all about the front side guys.
We've got to make sure that we're balancing up our upper body pushing power, with our
upper body pulling power,
if we want to avoid injuries and keep our shoulders nice and healthy.
So what's the gauge for this?
You want to be able to do at least 20% more than you can in your bench press, at whatever
given rep range.
So let's say you're a 200 pound guy and you're doing 225 for 5 reps, ok on your bench press,
just throwing out a number.
20% of that would be an additional 50 pounds.
You add that on top of that, that's 275 pounds that you should be able to do for 5 reps of
a Pull Up.
Well if you're a 200 pound guy, you need to put 75 pounds of plates, hanging below you,
just like I showed you a couple weeks ago in our back workout, with up to 90 pounds
I had,
and you want to start cranking out at least 5 reps.
If you can do that, you know you've got a good equality between your frontside and backside
strength,
and that's going to be critically important, for like I said, maintaining the health of
your shoulders.
So whatever the rep range is that you're working in your bench press, you want try to be able
to match that on the backside with your Pull Ups.
So there you have it guys.
Pull Ups, Chin Ups, it doesn't really matter.
They're both great exercises, they both belong in your workout program.
They're both a very big part of the ATHLEANX Training System.
But knowing how to do them, knowing the differences between the two.
The nuances of the elbow angles, it really helps to understand what you're doing.
And if you don't have a knowledge of what you're doing when you go to the gym,
I always say, you're just working out, you're not training.
We try to let you train.
Because when you train you see results much faster, and when you train like an athlete,
you get a chance to see results even faster than that.
We do that guys, with the ATHLEANX Training System.
If you haven't already, head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and get our Training System.
It's available there and we even have a completely Bodyweight Only Workout version, called ATHLEAN
XERO.
Because if you think you can't build serious muscle with Bodyweight Only, your fooling
yourself, or someone gave you bad advice.
We've got that too, if you're here because you like to see bodyweight exercises.
Alright guys, make sure you leave me a comment and some thumbs up below.
Did you like the video, did you find it helpful, what else is it that you'd like to see.
Remember, it doesn't matter what your doing up here at the bar, make sure you're doing
it the right way, overhand, underhand.
That's what's most important.
Tell me the other things you're having trouble with and I'll make sure I help you out.