Perfect Pullup/Chinup

The Perfect Pull-up and Chin-up

• Watch your grip. Make sure to grip the bar towards your fingers. Basically, it should rest on the soft part just below your fingers. Avoid pinching your skin there. Pull-ups will cause callouses but they will actually make the exercise easier. Pinching the skin, on the other hand, will cause you unnecessary pain.
• Pack your shoulders. Always start the chin-up from a dead hang position. From there the first thing to do is, with straight arms, to pull your shoulders down toward the body and pack them into your torso.
• Use your back. The pull-up or chin-up is primarily an exercise for your back muscles. Those are the lats – the muscles of your armpits. You will fail to get good if you can’t feel and use your lats. It’s just that the biceps is too small and too week, no matter how well developed, to allow you chin-up mastery. Here is quick drill to feel those muscles. Extend your arms forward and ask a buddy to exert upward pressure on your arm. Now, try to lower it in spite of his efforts. Feel those muscles working? Good – use them in the pull-ups.
• Cross your legs. The phenomenon called irradiation allows neighboring muscles to make each othe stronger when contracting harder. So by crossing and flexing your legs against each other, you become stronger.
• Bend the bar. By attempting to twist the pull-up bar downward (your left hand will twist counter-clockwise and your right hand will twist clockwise) you will achieve a greater contraction in your upper body.
• Squeeze your butt. Same as crossing your legs and gripping hard, squeezing the glutes will give you an instant strength boost.