What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X.com.
The pull up, by far, one of the best exercises that you could do, but so many people struggle
to do it.
As a matter of fact, if you flip your hands up underneath and do a chin up you might find
that you're able to do a hell of a lot more than you can of the pull up.
The fact is, people are puzzled by why that is.
I'll tell you today, the answer doesn't even rely on your back, but probably in your arm.
You see, one of the biggest problems that people have when they're trying to do pull
ups is a weakness in the brachia radialis muscle.
That's a muscle that runs from our upper arm down, it crosses our forearm and then inserts
down here in our forearm.
So you can see it's this muscle right here.
You can grab that wad of muscle right up in there and that’s' what we're talking about.
When it operates the most is when we're in a pronated position and then we're flexing
our elbow, or bending our elbow.
What are we doing here when we're doing a pull up?
We get in this position here, we're in a pronated position, hands over, we go here and our arms
are straight, elbows are pretty much straight, and then when we come up we're flexing the
elbow into this pronated position.
You can see, I think, from there that this muscle pops out a lot.
If you'll come up here I'll show you.
Again, when I do a pull up I come down and you see it pops out right here, again, with
that pronated grip.
If I go underhand I don’t have that anymore.
That contribution is gone.
So it's here that when I come down, every time I pull a lot of pull is being exerted
through that muscle.
If you have a weakness there you're going to struggle to do pull ups where you might
be able to still continue to do chin ups.
What are you supposed to do in order to get better at pull ups?
Well, I always advocate doing pull ups because doing the exercise is going to strengthen
the muscles that are required for the exercise.
So you might want to put the resistance band on the pull up bar and allow yourself to unweight
some of the bodyweight that you're trying to lift and get better that way.
You could certainly do exercises directly for the brachia radialis and most of them
are probably ones that you've done before, but a lot of times we ignore them because
we stick to the same old exercises like bicep curls.
It would be more of a reverse curl.
So you have your hands overhand, this way, and then you reverse curl up, backward.
You can go into a hammer curl here, where you come up in this neutral grip position.
So the thumb is in line here with my arm and I come up and do a hammer curl – straight
up and down – or you could do a hammer curl and then pronate it and go down slow you get
that eccentric in here through that muscle.
Whatever you do, you just want to make sure that you've got this pronated grip here whether
you maintain that through the whole thing, or have to work in the beginning to supinate
on the way up first.
This is your strength – your bicep here – but then pronate on the way down.
That might be where you want to start.
The idea is: don't neglect that muscle if you're trying to get better at the pull up
exercise.
A lot of times, because it's not something that's right here in our back that we're focusing
on when we do the exercise, a lot of us will ignore it and forget all about it.
Not here at Athlean-X, guys.
Not if you want to start training like an athlete and overlook nothing in your training,
you want to make sure you're doing everything you need to do to optimize what you're doing
here in the gym.
All right, guys.
If you're looking for a complete training program that shows you step by step how to
get the most out of everything you do, whether it be a pull up, or a squat, or any workout
you're doing; that's my job as a physical therapist to make sure I can show you the
best way to get there and how to get there the safest way.
You can find that over at AthleanX.com.
In the meantime, if you found this video helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs
up below and I'll do my best to bring the things that you guys want to see here in the
coming weeks ahead.
I'll talk to you soon.