Get Your First Chin-Up: Start Building New Levels Of Strength
You’ve finally found it…
The “Definitive guide” to get your first chin-up!
What you’re about to get in this post is a Step By Step Guide on how to get your first chin-up. I want to eliminate the paralysis by analysis everyone runs into when approaching this!
This over thinking leaves beginners (and advanced athletes) feeling STUCK in their progress. There’s so much to learn when it comes to designing workouts—and the fitness space on social media makes things so confusing!
But when you understand the big-picture view…
When you can see how all the different pieces are meant to work together…
You’ll know how to design a workout for peoples specific goals. Regardless of what equipment they have available, how often they can workout and any injuries they are dealing with!
Let’s get right to it!
And if you are into big picture view on more gymnastic and flexibility work, you’ll love my newsletter!
THE STRUCTURE
This workout structure works for beginner, intermediate and advanced trainees. It works regardless if you want your first chin-up or a one arm chin-up. It works whether your goals involve strength, flexibility or performance.
Primary Exercise
Assistance Exercise
Remedial Exercise
When keeping these categories in mind, you will leave no stone unturned and you are assuring you are hitting every aspect needed to reach your goal.
Commit these 3 categories to memory. Let’s now get into each one and how they would be applied to your first chin-up! And if you are interested in learning more about mastering gymnastics and flexibility work, you’ll love my newsletter.
Primary Exercise
Primary exercises are the most important movement you will do. In most cases, they will be the exact movement your goal is. For the case of developing your first strict chin-up, I like to choose one of the following movements. The order they are presented in, is how I like to progress them:
Floss Chin-up ….Fast forward to 4:37 in the video
Assistance Exercises
These are movements that are going to help support the progress of our “Primary Exercise.” We are generally going to work higher reps in order to make the muscle bigger. Since a bigger muscle is going to be a stronger one. For our discussion of getting our first chin-up, I like to choose one of the following movements:
Remedial Exercises
Remedial exercises are going to bring up weak links in the chin-up movement pattern. We are trying to strengthen small muscles that can hold back our progress. With the chin-up the two weak areas can be:
Biceps
Shoulder blade
Putting It All Together
A. On the minute x 10 minutes:
1. Eccentric chin-up x 1 rep….take 10 seconds to lower
B. Ring rows: 4 sets x 10 reps; rest 120 seconds
C1. Hanging scapula retraction: 3 sets x 5 reps; rest 45 sec
C2. Preacher curls: 3 sets x 10 reps/side; rest 45 sec
Need more help on how to read these workouts? Check out this video explaining how to go from start to finish.
If you are more of a visual learner, I’ve done an entire video on this topic over on my youtube.
Closing Thoughts
And that, my friends, is the break down of the structure I have used (and continue to use) to get my clients their first chin-up. But the cool thing about this structure, it can work with any strength, flexibility or performance goal.
It’s worked for one arm chin-ups, front splits and deadlifting.
It works because it takes all the jigsaw pieces of programming and fits them together in a way that fits.
And if you begin applying it the way I’ve just explained, it will help you to safely make progress in your training!