How to Improve Your Chin Ups
By Guest Writer: Jason Ferruggia
Today I am going to offer a very easy, completely unscientific method that will help you add more reps to your chins.
One of the major problems is that for most average guys a set of chins is a five rep max.
Therefore it is true CNS draining Max Effort work. And they repeatedly do this time after time, workout after workout.
There is no other exercise that you would continually max out on and take to near death failure like you do with chin ups.
You would know better than to do that with squats and deads. But everyone is fine with doing it on chins. And I truly believe that to be one of the major reasons why more people don’t improve on their chins with any regularity.
The other problem is that there isn’t enough variety in the rep ranges and when you continually do those five rep max sets you are never doing anything to improve your endurance in that movement pattern.
To get better on the 225 pound bench test you would do things like strap pushups, ascending board presses or pushups, high rep dumbbell presses, etc. on one day to build your endurance and some heavy pressing on another day to build your strength.
But most people don’t take this approach with their chins; they only work on the lower end of the rep scale trying to improve strength, but do nothing to improve endurance. And obviously this doesn’t always work too well.
So the simple solution is to throw in more high rep work; which would again involve the use of the bands. The bands got you from zero chins to one and now they can help get you from your current plateau up to a new PR.
Exactly how, you ask…
