#569 Most Chin-up Advice is WRONG...Here's What WORKS (Yet Nobody Teaches!)

[MUSIC] >> He started this first gym out of a 500 square foot storage closet. >> Boss, we got it. >> Now, work to set us off to build a world-renowned brand while becoming a legend in the sports performance industry. >> So, well, here's how to work through my office, turn this little gym into a world-renowned place. >> And I'm not going to be satisfied until we are number one in the world and the country on this block everywhere. >> Damn. [MUSIC] >> I'm not trying to blend with the crown. [MUSIC] I'm trying to make an impact in this industry. [MUSIC] >> And now he's bringing his personality, passion and expertise to you. >> Through this powerful podcast. >> Welcome to the industrial stretch show. Here's your almost go to Frank. >> Surprise, surprise, and welcome to episode number 569 of the industrial strength show. It is your boy, Joe D, present day, Joe D, by the way, not me from 10 years ago, which was the original plan for this week's show. But after discussing my five relative strength standards two weeks ago, and then getting a bunch of follow-up questions, most notably on how to improve Chin-up strength. That was the test that most people tend to struggle with when Smitty and I mentioned it and then I posted those five tests on my Instagram. So I then followed up on that specific topic this past Monday on my Instagram, where I made a post featuring WWE superstar Liv Morgan with a guest appearance from my daughter, Adriana, by the way, who I was very proud of for her Chin-up demos. But anyway, I shared the system that I used with them and hundreds of other clients to get their first Chin-up. And then many more afterwards. But again, I guess it's just a very popular topic because so many people struggle with Chin-ups. So after this Monday's post, which is still up there, I'll link it in the show notes. You could go check it out. But that was more geared towards how to get your very first Chin-up. And again, very popular post yet it led to a lot more questions from people who were asking, how do I get more Chin-ups? I could already do four or five or a couple people said, man, I'm stuck at like nine Chin-ups. I just can't get double digits. I had 12 Chin-ups for men and six for women as kind of my standard when I posted those five relative strength standards. And a couple people were a few reps shy of reaching that goal. So with all that being said, instead of posting my old podcast with Stephanie McMahon, which I know I had mentioned last week. But then I know I'm all over the place right now, but I got a lot going on. I'm trying to have a lot in my brain right now. But after I had mentioned last week that I would just repost my original podcast with Stephanie McMahon, which was over 10 years ago, which I thought had gone missing from the internet because I was with CBS Radio when we did that podcast. But Triple C, Timmy and many others in the audience informed me that those missing podcasts, most of them, if not all of them have reappeared. So I didn't want to take the lazy approach and just repost something that you can find on your own. If you do want to listen to that again. So instead, because I love you all, I couldn't stand the thought of not speaking to you for a full week. So I decided to squeeze in this brand new show for you guys and get it to you out early as well. By the way, we didn't even mention that. I get in the show out to you all a day early. But yeah, getting back to the topic at hand, we're going to talk chin ups. I'm going to review how to get your first chin up just in case some of you aren't on Instagram and didn't see that post. Plus, you know, it's under two minutes. There's only so much you could share in under two minutes. I left out a lot of nuance and a few important details in that post. So we'll cover that. And then we're going to also help you guys improve your chin up strength in general. Maybe even double that strength. So here's the deal. I mean, I've, shit, I've spent the last 30 years now. And that's, that's a real number. 30 years helping people get their first chin up and then helping those who can already do chin ups, double their chin up strength. And I could tell you this, most of what you see online is either incomplete advice or complete bullshit. Everyone just copies with the person before them said and unfortunately most of the time the person they're copying is just another influencer who's never trained a single client in their life. So the same bullshit gets passed down and no one actually gets any better. But that all changes here today if chin up performance is a goal of yours. And remember, even though that's going to be the topic for today, also know that while it's a great exercise, it's not the be all end all. There are no mandatory exercises. You've heard me say it a million times. So, you know, I'm not forcing anyone to do chins, but I do think it is a great exercise. Like if you do struggle with them and it's not like a real serious issue or there are some people who are just like I know some former NFL guys, former lineman who lost a lot of weight and they're lean now and way healthier, but they're still big guys. Like you're a big tall guy that has had shoulder issues or shoulder surgeries and you're just like 250 plus pound dude. It might not even, you know, you might be lean and healthy for genetically for your structure, but it's still there are certain people that it might not be the best exercise choice for I guess is what I'm trying to say. But for most of you, I do really like it because if you're not good at it, we know how this whole conversation started was relative strength standards, right? And improving your relative strength, especially as you age, it's so important to be lean and healthy, not just big and strong and unhealthy. We want to be lean and chin ups are just one of those exercises exercises that kind of keep you honest in the kitchen. You're not going to perform well if you're carrying a bunch of excess baggage, you know, in the form of fat weight, that's not going to help anyone's chin up performance. So it kind of keeps you honest there. I like the tie in to your nutrition, but then it's also great, especially for men who lack shoulder mobility and that overhead mobility. It kind of forces you to pay more attention to that instead of just doing, you know, a rotator cuff exercise here and there and your warm up and it's kind of an afterthought every now and then you do a half ass, extra stretch or, you know, some bullshit for 20 seconds. It forces you to pay more attention to mobilizing the internal rotators and improving your thoracic extension and mobility and just spending more time on mobility. That's going to pay off in many other ways down the road as far as just your overall joint health and how you feel because so many of us just we sit too much, we stare at our phones, we stare at our computers and improving that shoulder mobility in conjunction with paying a little extra attention to what's going on in the kitchen. I think those are good things for most of us. So let's get into this quick recap of of the real that I posted on Monday as far as how to get your first chin up. This is information for people who cannot do one chin up. So if that's you or if you're a personal trainer, this information is gold because the majority of your clients, especially if you work with general pop, aren't going to be able to do a chin up and so many people have that as a goal, but most trainers don't know what to hell to do. And I'll tell you, biggest mistake number one, I mentioned this real briefly at the end of the real. I don't know, you know, how many people listened all the way to the end, but biggest mistake is just jumping up on the chin up bar and trying to do a chin up every now and then. That is not going to improve your chin up performance or I know some people I do it every day, like they just get to the gym and it's like they can't walk past the chin up bar without jumping up there and just trying to pull themselves up. That is not going to improve your chin up strength. It's actually just going to be depressing because you're reminding yourself more often that you can't do a chin up. That is just testing your strength. You're not taking the time to build strength. You don't have a plan. You don't have a system and progressions in place. So what makes you think that one day you're just going to randomly jump up there and you're magically going to do a chin up? We all know the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again, thinking you're going to get a different result. It's just, it doesn't happen. So first, let's review my system for getting your first chin up. And again, I know everyone wants like the specific answer and how many sets and reps and time there, there is a lot of nuance to this. I'll get into a little bit more than I did in a two minute Instagram reel, but at the same time, it depends on the client, right? Like each phase, there's four phases that I generally go through and a couple people asked me, well, how long do I spend in each phase? It depends, right? I've had some people three to six weeks in each phase and they're just hyper responders. They respond well. They progress three to six weeks boom onto the next phase, three to six weeks. They graduate onto the next phase, three to six weeks. And then they get, they get their first chin up. That's incredible. And it's not that uncommon because a lot of people, again, they just, the, the strength might be there. They just haven't had the structure, a system of proper progression in place. But some people, I'm not going to lie, even as someone who considers themselves, you know, one of the best in the biz at what I do experience wise, getting someone to do their first chin up. A ton of success, but I'm not going to lie. Have I had people that it took, you know, close to a year, sometimes a year plus to get there for various reasons? Yes. Like there are some that they might be in each phase for months at a time. You know, it's not this like perfect system that takes a specific amount of time. Some of these phases can overlap, right? You go from phase one to phase two, but you might still incorporate some of those exercises from phase one. So I just want to get all that out there before I start going through these and now let's actually go through these. So getting your first chin up, I like to start with ISO holds. Phase one is like the isometric phase. So for, and remember, this is, you're still training like you could do the thing I love about this. If you like an upper lower split, that's fine. You could do a push pull leg split. Your other training can remain the same, but when you are specifically training the chin up instead of just jumping on the bar and trying to do a chin up and failing a couple times and calling that your chin up training or just strapping on a heavy band that basically just takes you for a ride up and down with you doing little to nothing. And you call those types of assisted band pull ups, your pull up training, which I'm going to explain why the way most people do band assisted chin ups doesn't really help them get to the point where they're doing an actual real chin up. But yeah, where was I going with that? That's where most people go wrong. So we start with flexed arm hangs is the specific chin up training for phase one. That is the main exercise. You're not doing any work getting your chin over the bar. Get up a bench, a stool, a box and just jump up there or literally have get a high enough box that you climb onto. You get up chin over the bar and then kick the box away or bend your knees, bring your knees up so your feet aren't touching anything and you're holding your chin over the bar. This could be anywhere from five to 10 seconds, up to 30 seconds is kind of my standard. Generally we'll do two to three sets of X number of seconds depending on where we're starting with their starting point of strength is. But we're doing this to build grip strength core strength upper back strength. And it's one of those exercises I find people are able to progress pretty quickly at once you introduce it to them. Even if they're really bad at it, like they can only hold their chin over the bar for five or 10 seconds, you'll be surprised before you know it. It's 12 seconds. It's 15 seconds. Now they're doing sets of 20 seconds. Once you can perform two sets of 30 or more seconds, but you know with a minute or two between each set, I would say you are ready to move on to phase two. Doesn't mean you'll never do ISO hold chin ups again. I got I got guys and girls that could bang out 10 plus rep sets of chins who I still include ISO holds in their in their workout and their warm up. So when I say you graduate, it's not like you never do it again. It's just the next phase, the next step that you're probably able to do would be phase two and eccentric pull ups, which are jumping up, not doing any work on the way up, starting with your chin over the bar and then slowly lowering yourself down. Remember on average, we're like 30 to 40% stronger, eccentrically than concentrically. So just because you can't pull yourself up and do a chin up, doesn't mean you can't control yourself down. So again, very generally speaking, I start with two to three sets of three reps per set, each rep generally being between five and ten seconds to start with the ultimate goal of getting up to 30 seconds. Like once you could do one controlled even 30 second lowering, you're generally ready to move on to the next phase. And when I say even the reason why I mention that because so many people I see even some of our CPS coaches, I've seen they've sent me videos of them programming eccentric chins and they think their clients ready to progress. But then when they get to the next phase, they don't do as well because they weren't really doing a 20 or 30 second eccentric. They were doing a flexed arm hang for 28 seconds and then free falling for two seconds. That's not a 30 second eccentric lowering. If you want to see what it should look like, you want to see a text book rep or at least part of it, I cut some of it off to fit in the video. The B-roll footage when I'm talking about phase two eccentric strength in my Instagram reel, which the link will be in the show notes. There's a box underneath me of Liv Morgan doing one rep of 30 second eccentric lowering. It almost looks like it's just a picture because she's doing it so perfectly. It's an even 30 seconds from the top all the way to the bottom. It's not hold yourself and then free fall. It's like legit. You're just moving a little bit every second and she really, she timed it perfect. I happen to be recording that. I don't even know who recorded that set to be honest with you, but it was a great set to get on video because I have the the full set and when you watch it, it's exactly 30 seconds from the time, you know, I start counting to the time her arms are at lockout and it is perfectly even. Even during, you know, that sticking point where it gets harder when you're a little bit, you know, right around the 90 degree mark where most people kind of lose tension and start falling, it was still perfectly controlled from start to finish. Once you could do that, you move on to phase three, and that is now we're doing chin ups, but with some assistance. And I have three, well, two, and then a bonus, which I wouldn't call, I guess technically it's not assisted, but it's a slightly easier variation of a chin up. I'll get to at the end. I didn't mention that variation in my Instagram reel, but for assisted chin ups, the most popular variation is band assisted or those the machines, the the selectorized assisted pull up machines, the the gravitron or whatever to how they're called, which I gotta say the concept is great. Like I love the fact that we could be very specific in our in our loading and our progressions each week, as far as as you get stronger, you have less weight helping you up. And you would it all makes sense on paper, but I just got to say from experience, and I don't know for sure why I haven't seen as many people actually get better at real chin ups or use that machine to get them to the point where they're doing their first chin up. As much as band assisted in the way I'm going to explain to you has helped. So in other words, I will take bands over that machine. A they're more practical, right? I don't know how much those machines cost, but I'm sure they ain't cheap. And I know a lot of you listening, train at home in your garage and your basement, probably not an investment you really need to make for a home gym. But they're very common in commercial gyms and they're very popular. I just I see a lot of people doing the same weight, the same amount of reps, just the same shit on that machine. And maybe that's the problem. It's more people who don't know how to train or using that machine and they're not progressing properly. That might be the reason, but from my observation, I could tell you I just feel like, man, how many people have you seen used that machine and like each week, each month, you see them doing better. And then next thing you know they're on the real chin up bar banging out chins and you go, whoa, wow, I've watched you progress and really work towards, you know, banging out these chins. That's very impressive. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone. So I'm just throwing that out there. I love my band assisted chins, but here's what I have noticed. The most popular way to do them, right, is to choke the band around the chin up bar. You hang the band from the chin up bar and then you put your foot or your knee in the loop of the band and then the band assists assists us up that way, right? By the way, nothing wrong with that. I still do that variation at times and I and I did it shit for years. Like I'll be completely transparent and honest, I've only switched how I set up the bands and really have seen a significant difference over the last, I'll say, it's not two years. It's about a year and a half of consistent every week with a handful of clients setting up the bands where I loop them from one J hook in the rack to the other, right? So you have the J hooks on each side of the rack, loop the band around the J hooks and then you put your foot, you step on the bands with your feet. So the bands will be along the bottom of your feet. You could also do your knees but we start with the feet because then your legs are straight and that's going to give you more help out of the bottom. But that way, kind of helping from the bottom up as opposed from top down, why do I like it better? Well, first off, you have two levels of progression as opposed to just for the most part, I know you can nitpick. There's different things you could do. But for the most part, when you do the traditional setup, the main way everyone progresses is once it just gets too easy, they progress to a lighter band, right? You go from, if you're using an elite FTS band, you go from the light band to the mini band maybe or if the hand expands bands, you go from a number three to the number two, the baby blue, for you know, the dark blue to the baby blue, which is a little bit better that that progression isn't as extreme. But like most band levels from one level to the next, it's quite a bit of difference. So just because you might be doing three sets of 10 with again, let's just say a light band from Elite FTS, one of the, I think they're the orange ones now. You're banging out three sets of 10, the traditional way with the band choked around the top of the chin up bar and you have it wrapped around your knees, let's say, and you go, this is getting pretty easy. Let me, let me use a lesser band. So you go to a mini or even too many bands you wrap around. So it's not that extreme. That's still, that's like benching 315 and like going damn, I finally got 315 on the bench, gonna try 405 next week. Like no, let's start with maybe 320, right? Let's, or if we have, if we have fractional plates, maybe we do 322 and a half, like you're not going to go from 315 to 405, yet that's what we expect with our band assisted pull ups. We, we just do one band for a really long time and then when it gets easy, we drop down to the lighter band, but it's usually a pretty extreme drop. Um, and so that's why I love the other approach where I set up the J hooks. Obviously, so the higher you set the J hooks up, the closer they are to the actual chin up bar, the more help you're getting. The lower you place them down, less help, right? Pretty common sense. So we have that and then we, we still have different bands. We could use different level bands, but that progression being able to use a specific band and set up those J hooks on a certain hole in the rack. Let's say, you know, it's, it's 15 holes down. Um, I got a client doing chin ups. And I'm mentioning this because I've done it. I kept band assisted chin ups in triple H's program for a year, even when I rotate, you know, we do our mini cycles every four weeks. I changed the programs on his upper body number two upper body B workout. We kept band assisted pull up slash chin ups. I'll talk about this specific grip at the end of the show, but I kept them in and because he had a goal that he wanted to improve his shoulder mobility. He was like, I think I would like to see if I could get back to doing chin ups. I haven't I didn't program them in his, we've been training 16 years now. Before this point, I haven't programmed them at all. Again, he was one of those guys just too, too big. And while his mobility was improving greatly to hang, you know, dead hang from a chin up bar, not the best idea, but we slowly started incorporating dead hangs in his warm up offsetting some of his weight, getting to the point where then he was just doing regular dead hangs when they became more comfortable and actually started making his shoulder feel better instead of worse and, you know, aggravating things. Then we started band assisted chins with a pretty thick band and pretty high up on the rack where the band was doing a lot of work, but I loved whenever he was able to do three sets of 10 and he could get on that third set. If he gets 10 or more reps, we did it kind of as a plus set instead of going to a completely different band, which would be way too much of a progression. He's got the one inch hole spacing on his racks. So I would just move the J hooks down one inch, same band, one inch, and it didn't make too much of a difference, but we would see a one or two rep difference. Like if he was banging out three sets of 10 with the band on the J hooks on whole number 15, once we moved it down to whole number 14 and the band was giving a little less help. You would see it. He would get like a set of 10, then a set of nine, then a set of eight. And then we'd keep the J hooks at that same level with the same band until he was able to get three sets of 10. Then I would move it down again. And then we did a combination of moving the J hooks down. And then at one point, they were getting down pretty low, not helping much. We said, okay, now let's change to a lighter band. And we had to move the J hooks back up kind of like, you know, three steps forward, one step back. We're we're starting over a little bit by moving the J hooks up, but now we have less band helping us. And then sure enough, after time, we got back down to the same height of the bands with a smaller band. And now we're we're down to a monster mini band. So we're like the point I'm trying to make is the progression. They very small, incremental progressions, but very, very specific and measurable. And I feel like the more specific and the more you can measure something, the better you're going to improve, right? Because we know exactly where we're making improvements as opposed to like, I went from a band that helped me 110%. I was doing absolutely nothing. And then so we progressed to this next band that's only helping me about 30%. I can't even do one. You go from doing three sets of 10 easy to barely being able to get one. It's just too much of a jump. So setting the bands up from J hook to J hook and then lowering them as you get stronger way better way for measuring and people who have a goal of doing a real chin up. I have seen way more carryover with that setup than choking the band around the top of the chin up bar. I'll on my website. I'll post a picture. I'll do like a screenshot of I think I have my daughter doing band assisted chin ups that way. If you're I feel like I'm explaining it well, but I don't know sometimes I also know what I'm I'm picturing it as I'm talking. If you've never set up the bands that way, you might be a little bit confused. There's also b roll footage of what I just spoke about in the Instagram reel that I posted on Monday. But if you don't have that, I'll take a screenshot of the video and I'll make it part of the image that is on my podcast industrialstrengthshow.com when I post well, as you're listening to this when this show is posted episode 569, the the header, the picture at the top of the page will you'll see a picture of the proper band setup. Not that the other setup is improper, but I'll say the the better more ideal band setup. All right. And so the reason. Well, let me so that's that's band assisted. Okay. And that is phase three. One of my favorite exercises. I also like and this is probably a progression from even the band assisted once they start getting pretty good at bands band assisted chin ups. If you are if they're getting style and you want to do something different, but kind of has, you know, similar difficulty or I would say maybe a little bit more difficult, a slight progression. I think jumping pull ups are one of the most underrated exercises for improving your real chin up strength. If you're just not there, you need to be close. You can't if you like grab a chin up bar and you can't even barely bend your elbow at all. Like you're just nowhere near a chin up yet. Jumping pull ups aren't going to help you, but if you're getting really close, it's just that that first part when you're at that dead hang, just getting over that hump. That's where a jumping chin up or pull up is going to be perfect. You want to get it to where when you jump and catch the bar, your elbows are a little bent. If they're too bent, it kind of defeats the purpose. Like if you have if you have a great vertical jump and you just jump up and your elbows are like well past 90 degrees where you only have to pull your chin up, you know, two inches to get it over the bar. You're not going to benefit as much from those, but again, if you watch that video that I posted on Monday, that I have my daughter standing on two boxes. Because if she doesn't stand on the boxes, she jumps up and grabs the bar and she's still in a dead hang. So it kind of defeats the purpose. But standing on those two boxes, now she's a little bit closer to the chin up bar. So when she jumps and grabs it, there's a slight bend in the elbow and that in conjunction with just the momentum and the speed of the jump helps her get past that sticking point. And then you'll see it's like a little bit of a struggle. And then boom, pulls herself right up, chin over the bar. And then I always have her lower under control. Let's still try and take advantage of that eccentric strength. Don't just free fall. And that is more of a more sets less reps type of exercise. I like doing those in clusters. Like do one, lower yourself under control, rest 15, 30 seconds, do another one. And I'll do like three to five rep cluster sets where I'm giving her 15 to 30 seconds in between each rep. And then a full two to three minutes between each set. But remember speed helps break helps you kind of break past sticking points. If I could generate more speed in a bench press, if you get stuck halfway off your chest, that's the whole point of the West Sidebar Bell and the dynamic effort method, right? If I could generate more speed from my chest to 90 degrees, once I get to 90 degrees, the speed that momentum kind of helped me push right by that as opposed to if I push slow and I don't have any speed, I'm going to that bar is going to come back down. It's like if I had, if we had a bowling ball and we rolled one on a flat surface, just gave it a little bit of a push and let it roll down a flat surface. And the other one, I give it a little bit of a push, but there is a 10 yard, the first 10 yards, there's a hill that's about a 45 degree slope. And then the final 30 yards is straight. If we have both those bowling balls and we push them both at the same time, one has to go 40 yards, flat ground the whole way. The other one goes after at the five yard mark, there's a little hill, a dip and it has a 10 yard hill and then the rest of it is straight away. The one that rolls down that hill is going to get to the 40 yard marker faster, right? Because it had that speed for 10 yards, it built up that speed and then that speed took it through that final 25, 30 yards, whatever it is, the speed carried it through and it's going to win the race in this case. That's what we're doing with a band assisted chin up, a jumping chin up, a speed bench if we're talking about benching, generate more speed to overcome that sticking point. So if you're wondering, you know, a reason and a purpose behind what you do, if you're someone who likes to know the reason and the purpose behind things we do, that's one of the reasons for the band assistance or for jumping, etc. So that's phase three. Oh, the other one I wanted to mention, another exercise we use a lot during this phase, which you could loosely categorize it as an assisted chin up, I guess, just because it's a little, I don't want to say easier because it's a great exercise for those. Even if you can do chin ups, I still do these in my training a lot of V sit or L sit rack chin up, right? Where you set up in a rack almost like you're going to do an inverted body weight row, but set the bar up a little bit higher, elevate your feet, keep your upper body, your torso more vertical. You'll maybe a slight lean back. And then you're doing pull ups, you're pulling your chin over the bar with your feet, your heels are elevated on a bench or a box in front of you. Some call them V sit, chin, rations or L sit rations, call them what you want. They are a great exercise for training specific chin up strength, right? But we're offloading some of our body weight because we have our heels placed on a bench or a box out in front of us. Now, you know, if I weigh 200 pounds instead of me pulling up 200 pounds, which I'm doing in a chin up, maybe this is more like, I don't know, my left leg is pretty skinny. So my it doesn't weigh that much, but you know, 150 pound, 150 pounds, I'm pulling up instead of 200 pounds. Maybe if I'm taking away the weight of my legs, I have to check my last in body, see what my legs actually weigh, but you get the point, great exercise as well to throw in during phase three of my four phase chin up progression, which, and this is the, this is the phase that requires the best coaches. I, because I don't have a specific amount of sets or reps to tell you, once you get here, you're able to do a chin up because it has varied so much throughout the years, plus there's so many different brands of bands. So I don't know what band are you using? How high is the rack? You're, you're, you know, choking the band around how tall is the athlete? Like how much help is the band actually giving them? There's so many variables. All I will say is again, favor more sets, less reps. I don't like training to failure in this context. I like keeping the reps clean. Like quality is number one technique, technical execution. We want pristine reps, right? Because chin ups, it requires a lot of strength, a lot of relative strength, but you want technique as well. There is a better technique. That's a whole nother podcast, but we want to be practicing as close to perfect chin up technique as possible. We don't want to just sloppily be keeping up, doing anything in our power to get our chin over the bar, you know, the heavy ass bands sling, shotting us up there. That's not going to help. I favor sets of like two to five, two to six and and accumulate volume with more sets cluster sets. Yeah. The clusters are a little bit more practical with the jumping pull ups and the L sit pull ups, having to strap a band on and off gets a little annoying. But if you set it up the way that I mentioned around the J hooks, where you're just stepping on it, it's, there's not as much of set up time. You're not looping the loop part of the band around a knee or your foot. You're just stepping on the band with each foot, grab the chin up bar, sink down and then go when you're done, you need a box or something because when you first start, the band's going to be set up higher. So you kind of need like pretty decent hip mobility, the hip flexion to, you know, drive your knee up and step off the band. So just have like a plyo box or something either in front or behind you to make the set up as easy as possible. But as you get better, you'll be lowering the band will be getting closer to the ground. And then the set up just becomes easier and easier. But the, the J hook setup, that is your, that's a 30 year experience thing. That's, that's your secret tip of the day for from the podcast. I'm telling you, it really does make a world of difference progression wise. Um, sneaky tricks for more chin ups. That's, that's the one right there. And way safer to, by the way, if you know, you see all these, these gym fail videos with the band snapping and slapping you in the face. If your feet slipped off, it's not, it's at least not going to hit you in the face, depending on how high up, uh, you know, where you are in your progression. It's, it's way safer in that sense. Nothing's coming and, and whipping you in the face with the, the band setup that I mentioned. So that, oh, and then you have to use again, your coach's eye. Once you get, you're using a light band, you know, you're down to a mini band. Um, or you're, you're able to bang out, you know, cluster sets of five. Like once you're doing like three sets of five jumping chin ups, you're, you're, you're pretty damn close. Or you're going to be doing a regular chin up. And so it varies, but that would be phase four. After focusing on those three exercises and phase three, getting really good at them, accumulating just reps and volume and, and building that specific chin up strength, then you could start occasionally testing and seeing. Hey, am I there yet? Can I do an actual chin up phase four full chin ups? Now we will finish today's show by answering the number one follow up question. I got after I posted Monday's real, how to do your first chin up was, how do I get more reps? I already can bang out some chins, but not as many as I want. How do I improve my reps? Well, first off, I already mentioned this, but just to reiterate, it's not just jumping up on the chin up bar and doing as many chin ups as you can. Like if you could do eight chin ups and you, you want to get to 10. If your chin up workout is, you know, whenever you program chins in your workout, if it's first set, I do as many as I can, I get eight. And then I rest and then I try another set. I end up getting five or six and then I do another set and I get three or four. You're going to be stuck there probably for a pretty long time. I'm not saying you won't ever get better, you know, practice does help. But if it's just jump up, do as many as I can and that has been the same number for over a year or for some of you probably even longer than that, it's time to make a change. We need to train and not just test. Okay. Now I'm running out of time. So I was going to give a whole bunch of different examples, but I'm going to limit it to one. So I know I want to give you something a little bit unique, but something unique that actually I've done and has worked and it always works. So I don't want to give you something that you've probably already heard about. Like, and these all work, by the way, a common approach is just adding more volume of chins, like having a total number of reps per workout and just saying like, I'm going to do one chin up after or before every single set of this workout, even if it's a leg day. If I'm doing four sets of leg press, then four sets of leg curls, four sets of leg extensions, which is definitely not one of my workouts, but just as an example, and you go, okay, I'm going to do a chin up before each one of those, you know, that's four sets, three different exercises. You know, that's 10 chin ups right there, extra on a random day. Now, depending on how many if you're someone who could already do 10 chin ups in a row, maybe then you want to say, I want to accumulate 20 or 30 total chin ups, every workout. So I'm going to do two chin ups before every set of every exercise. It doesn't fatigue you a ton doing that, but you just start accumulating chin up volume and you're practicing, right? You're, so it's helping with your technique, practice makes perfect. And since you're staying far away from failure, your, your technique is going to probably improve and get even better. So that's a great way to improve strength, but it's it's pretty common. you may have heard of that one before. And then also what I've used, if you could do, I'd say eight or more chins and you wanna improve, it's time to start focusing on weighted chin ups. You know, do two to three reps sets. Again, lots of sets, less reps with added weight. That is the fastest best way to improve your chin up strength. Now, with that being said, I'm gonna give you another one. I call these the pull up cluster ladder or ladder cluster, I don't know, call it what you want. But here's a cool progression for, and you could use these. This is for someone who could do, someone who wants to improve their chin up reps. I'll just give an example 'cause the last question I read was from someone who said they're right around five or six reps, but they wanna get to be able to do the 12 that I recommended in the relative strength tests. So if you're someone who could do five or six reps and you could just scale this based on how many reps you can currently do, but in this example, someone could do five or six reps and be honest with yourself. Like, don't say you could do six when really you could only do two or three dead hang chin ups. I'm talking dead hang real chin ups, find your number, and then multiply whatever your max reps in one set is. Multiply that between 1.5 or two. Two would be the max number. So in this case, if we take five times two is 10, six times two is 12, that would be the max number we are going to do, or that's the goal per cluster set. That's kind of our, the range we're shooting for. And I would stick between 1.5 and two, you'll know based on your strength when you do these numbers, what you think you'll be able to do. So if the number we're looking at is between 10 and 12 reps, my cluster is gonna look something like this. The first cluster set will do 10 total reps. You're gonna do one dead hang chin up, rest 30 seconds, then do two chin ups, rest between 30 and 60 seconds. Then you're gonna do three chin ups, rest probably closer to 60 seconds, and then four chin ups. That is one cluster set. One plus two plus three plus four, if my math is correct, that's 10 reps. So I don't think I explained it clearly, but that's what I'm referring to when I said, take your max chin ups, multiply it times two at the most, 1.5 at the least, and that's the number you wanna come up with per cluster set. So if someone was, let's say you have a 10 rep max of chin ups, so you wanna get, you wanna improve that number, we take 10, multiply it times 1.5 would be 15, multiply it by two would be 20, so somewhere between 15 and 20 reps per cluster. So in that case, the cluster might look like one chin up, then two chin ups, then three chin ups, then four chin ups, then five chin ups. That would be 15 total reps for that cluster, just to give you an example. But let's go back to our five to six rep guy, workout number one, set number one. We did one chin up, rested a few seconds, two chin ups, rested a few seconds, three chin ups, rested a few seconds, four chin ups, then I take a full break, three to four minute rest between that set, and I try to repeat that in the same fashion. That's workout number one. If you can do that, if you could complete two full cluster ladders or ladder clusters, then you move on, the next time you do this workout, and I recommend doing this workout once to twice a week, on non consecutive days include this in two of your workout, one to two of your workouts each week, workout number two, only if you completed those two clusters. If not, you keep doing it until you're able to get it. When you're able to move on, next workout, you would do the same thing, but we're adding a third cluster set, but that third cluster set is just one rep. So set one was you did one chin up, then two chin ups, then three chin ups, then four chin ups, then we rested a full three to four minutes. We did the same thing, one chin up, then two chin ups, then three chin ups, then four chin ups, rested full three to four minutes, round three, I just did one, and now you see where I'm going with this. If you were able to do that, next workout, which would be workout number three, first two rounds are exactly the same. You do the ladder, one, two, three, four, resting between 30 and 60 seconds between each. Rep, I'll call it, rest the full three to four minutes. You do it again, set a one, I said a two, I said a three, I said a four, rest full three to four minutes, and then round three would be one rep, rest about 30 seconds, two reps. That workout is done. If you were able to complete that, workout number four would be, first ladder is the same, one, two, three, four, resting between 30 and 60 seconds between each, then after the four reps, you take a full three to four minutes, do it again, one, two, three, four, resting 30 to 60 seconds between each, I guess I'll call it set rep, whatever you want to call it, you know what I'm talking about. And then full three to four minute rest, and then your third round would be a set of one, rest about 30 seconds, two reps, rest about 30 to 45-ish seconds, and then three reps. And then workout number five, the goal would be, three full ladders of one, two, three, four, yeah, that's three full ladders of one, two, three, four. So that would be 30 total chin ups, right, for that workout. You did one, then two, then three, then four, rested, you did that again, one, two, three, four, rested, and then again, one, two, three, four. Once you're able to complete all three rounds, you go back, so these aren't like, this isn't the only way to do this. This is the main way I've done it the most realistic, you know, that's worked well for me. The, my goal was always three full cluster sets, three rounds, if you will, of, in this case, it's one, two, three, four. If, like I said, if you were doing, if you were doing ten or more chin ups, your cluster sets might look like one, two, three, four, five, and then the goal would be three rounds of one, two, three, four, five. In this case though, it was one, two, three, four, for three rounds. That's 30 total reps. Once you get to that point and you could do that, you go back to square one, what I outlined as being workout number one, but we're gonna add five pounds. You're gonna add weight, and then you go through the same thing starting again, that, so workout number six would be identical to workout number one, but you add a five, you know, two, two and a half pound plates in your pocket or a five pound weight around your waist, would a five pound weight vest, whatever it may be, and then you go through that again. If everything went perfect and you progressed every week, which doesn't always happen, it would be 10 workouts or five weeks if you were doing this workout twice a week, or you know, 10 weeks if you did it once a week, you would see a pretty significant improvement in your chin ups. And you see, it takes a little time, but it's also not, when you have a plan in a progression, it's gonna take time, but it's not gonna take years. either because you're very precise in what you're doing. So if you have a little bit of patience, it will, the improvements will come quicker than they probably have been coming. But the key is only move on when you complete. You might have to do some of those workouts twice in a row, three times in a row before you're able to complete it and move on. Don't just keep moving on even if you're not getting the reps clean. You got to be able to get the reps clean. All right. Do that once to twice a week, preferably twice a week. Scale it based on what your current level of max chins is. And that's all I got. Definitely be conservative. I would go more round down, number wise, all that good stuff. And I'm running out of time. I had a couple other things. Yeah. No, I think I covered everything. I was just, again, diet is huge when you're looking to build chin up strength. You got to remove the excess baggage, aka body fat. So don't underestimate how important it is to, you know, pay attention to what's happening in the kitchen. And I talked about testing your strength versus building. We need to build strength. Don't just test all the time. Oh, and then the one final thing I wanted to mention, just if you really want to improve your chin-ups, and this is like a main goal of yours, or you have a client, it's main goal. Accessory exercises with a high carryover incorporate some fat grips into your training when you have your clients doing dumbbell curls, throw fat grips on those dumbbells once to twice a week. Rose, even though I know it will, it's, you know, people will argue, well, if you do fat grip, dumbbell rows, you're not going to be able to use as much weight. It's going to take away from your back and your lat development. And there is some truth to that. But trust me, doing so, it's not like you're never going to do a regular row or a regular lat pull down sprinkling in some fat handled rows. Absolutely helps. When you get that grip strong, it has such a profound effect on your chin up strength. I mentioned my, the old client Andrew McGurk, Andrew McGripp, the very first real world experiment. I saw it in my own eyes, you know, how improving your grip could just dramatically improve your chin up and overall strength. So don't be afraid to throw some fat grips on the dumbbells for specifically curls and rows are two of my favorite accessory exercises for helping with that chin up strength. So that is all I got for today. I hope you guys got a lot out of that. I hope I wasn't rambling too much. I got a lot going on behind the scenes over here. I got to go pack. If you're a WWE fan, by the way, and you're watching the hall of fame this week, you might see me and my family sitting out there in the crowd. And let's all hope our girl Liv Morgan brings home the woman's world championship at WrestleMania this weekend. Also, it's ironic this entire podcast, this discussion all started with with her video and the system I used to help her go from zero to one plus chin ups. She was my my living proof that the system that I outlined here today really works. And by the way, you see what I did there? Live, living proof. All right, that's probably my cue to leave. Oh, real quick. Last thing, if you are a gym owner, I can't believe I almost forgot this. If you're a gym owner next Friday, April 24th, I am hosting a live workshop with Chris Tutella, where we will be sharing our complete iron business blueprint framework for just $17. You will learn how to design a killer front end offer that will consistently attract new members into your gym. Then I will personally teach you how to keep those members via a world class group training program that is organized in a way that enables you to train more people without compromising results. And in fact, getting better results than you are currently getting and will also be revealing our five component business model that has helped dozens of gym owners just like you scale their business to multiple six figures per year. All while working smarter, not harder. And here is the best part. Last thing, every paid attendee automatically qualifies to apply and hopefully win a full full scholarship to our 90 day iron business blueprint coaching program, which is valued at $15,000. You have a real chance to win a full scholarship. And our past winners have changed their lives literally. So don't miss this opportunity. Just $17 gets you a seat at the table next Friday, April 24th. The link to attend and apply for the scholarship is in the show notes. Go click it. And I will talk to y'all when I get back from Vegas. Peace. [MUSIC]