tips to improve chin ups without negatives or bands

phatguerilla

I see a lot of posts from people looking to improve their chins and usually negatives and/or bands are recommended. Personally they never did anything for me, but I put together a 'program' of sorts that helped me a lot. I told one other person my tips and they reported the same benefits so I'm just throwing this up here to see if it can help anyone else.

Do this every time you're in the gym for I would say 3-4 weeks at least.

1. Dumbbell rows.
Use a variety of weights and rep ranges and angles. You can move between 4x6, 3x10, 3x15 etc, on the different days. Just do it often. When you do these pull with your elbow, and try and keep your arm at a 30-45 degree angle from the body on the heavier days.
On lighter days you can move to between 60 and 90 degrees from your body; don't do this with a low rep set. These angles will put more emphasis on different parts of your upper back. Keeping the arm tight to the body will target lats but you're not looking for that right now.
Brace your abs hard when doing db rows, and resist the rotational force. You should have ab doms the day after heavy db rows. Straps recommended.

2. Bicep curls. Again variety is best, I like preacher curls in particular. Remember to squeeze the db/bar tightly and use a full rom. For variety on different days you can either flex your hand back (palms up) or up (knuckles up) to hit different forearm muscles.
(Optional - forearm/reverse curls. I didn't do them but they can't hurt. Don't overdo it though).

3. Facepulls. start with 3 or 4 sets of 20. On the last set you should find it hard to get the last 5 reps, its even ok to rest-pause them if necessary. Keep your elbow high (above the shoulder line) and reduce the weight if you are pulling with your elbows at or below shoulder height. There are a couple of different ways of doing facepulls:
you can just pull with the arms;
you can squeeze the shoulder blades together first, then pull with your arms, almost like a double movement, then reverse it for each rep;
you can pull your shoulder blades together on the first rep and keep them in a static hold for the entire sets.

I've basically listed them in order of difficulty, so over several sessions using the same weight you could start with 3x20, then move to 4x20, then squeeze the shoulder blades each rep and then finally move to the static hold, all without increasing the weight.

If you're reasonably close to your goal bodyweight, or if you've been weight training for a while but still can't do chin ups, then hopefully this should help. I'd be grateful if anyone who follows this were to update in 3-6 weeks if there have been any benefits.

BigT555

i approve, i used these to master the pull-up (lat pull-downs switched for face-pulls). ill add that there are assisted chin-up machines as well that can help, although im not a huge fan of them (they just feel weird), and cable v-bar rows also help