Thursday, February 17, 2011

The Chin Up Puzzle

If you want to improve your chinups, should you practice doing chinups more often or should you do various exercises to improve overall upper body strength?

I thought I could do chinups at one time in my life. Turns out my form and technique were terribly wrong. First of all I didn't start with a deadhang. Sadly, I discovered that at a deadhang start, I could hardly do a single chinup.


Over a period of time, I improved to a single measly chinup. Which was actually an achievement seeing that I failed to do chinups before. But then my focus went elsewhere and I spent my time doing overhead presses, bodyweight rows (using the TRX) and pushups. That's all I did.


And today out of curiosity I tried doing chinups. Bare in mind it's been a couple of months since I last did them. And surprisingly I managed to do 3 of 'em. Again, I am the first to admit the number is nothing to shout about. But I'm just curious how I managed to improve on the numbers (by 200%... hahaha...) without training for them directly.


Oh just in case you're curious. My weight is a healthy 48kilos. I'm happy with it, and I think this is my ideal weight.

2 comments:

Adeline said...

Why cannot start at deadhang? So what is the starting position?

So you can still do 3 chinups. Great! What's the secret then, since you said it's been months since u last did them? Have you started using Pavel's technique?

Aizan Suhaira said...

Adeline: You should start at a deadhang (like the pic in my post). Maybe you misunderstood.

Previously My elbows were at an angle, so it's pretty much like cheating.

There is no secret. I myself don't know what happened. Maybe doing all those backrows, overhead presses and pushups helped strengthen my lats and biceps. Don't really know for sure.

And no I haven't used Pavel's technique yet. Must try doing that soon!