Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 2

This is part 2 of a selection of things I am using to change up my pull up training, if you haven't seen part 1, click here to check it out
Baseballs

Just put a bolt through a baseball and hook it to a chin up bar, you can also use hockey ball or anything strong enough to hold your weight. This requires a whole new level of grip strength. When training these with lock offs, it would give me a dead arm after every rep, this will kill your biceps as well.
Fat gripz

These are grips, that are fat. They will make the chin ups more difficult. Stick them on the bar and use them for the next 4 weeks, take them off and your chin ups will be stronger
Gymnastics rings

These are difficult as hell, but I am not really sure why, one arm chins on this are crazy difficult for me, but I'm working on it.
Rock rings

These are a cool tool by Metolius, normally used by rock climbers. They have 3 levels, each one gets more narrow and the ledge gets smaller, making it more challenging, you can also grab the top and just use it as a chin up handle. I am currently using them to try and get a door frame one arm chin. So I can do them Anywhere.

Thanks, hope this helps,
Enjoy the gains
Alex

Challenge your grip and increase your pull up strength pt 1

In this post, I will be going over the different grips I am using and the grips I am trying to use in order to keep my one arm chin training. Even though I will be speaking about them in regards to one arm chins, you can also use these variations with 2 arms, rows, front levers or even deadlifts if you are a freak.

1: Towels

I know a few of this may find this weird or stupid, but this, in my opinion, is the best place to start. I remember buying 6 tea towels when i was 16, and just doing one arm hangs, and one arm lock-offs on them, and my forearms grew and my grip got stronger, they are also great because the twist, so you can supinate your hands at the top of the pull up and get a great contraction on the short head of the bicep, this free rotation can also help avoid elbow and shoulder pain.

2:Rotating handles

I'm too poor to buy a 'rolling thunder', so I just brought a pair of those cable attachments that rotate, and strapped them to the pull up bar. When you try and hang of them with just one arm it will try and tear your hand off your arm, and may succeed. But when I got a one arm chin on it for the first time, I knew I had reached a milestone in my strength. You could add a fatgrip on it and make it as thick as a 'rolling thunder', I am yet to get a one arm chin off that. But when I am able to do that, I will go out and tear someones arm off just because I can.

3: Eagle loops

These were a little bit cheaper than the 'rolling thunder' so I got them. Normally. Whats cool, is that you can slowly reduce the number of fingers you use until you you get down to one finger, my current best is a one arm chin on 2 fingers.

4: Homemade chin up handle

I just made this from chain and a pole my mate found in the woods, all we had to do was wash the blood off it and lay low for a while (that was a joke). This is good because it allows you to be able to do one arm chins anywhere, just strap it to something overhead. You can also put fatgripz on them. They also allow you to do neutral grip one arm chins on a regular chin up bar. I found the neutral grip the easiest to learn when first doing the one arm chin.

This post is already pretty long, so I will be back with more ways to switch up your chin ups.

Enjoy your gains
Alex

Me and 'ladies man' my local paper boy

Around the world - more interesting than cardio

Around the worlds are a training method developed by bar hitters in New York. The original idea consisted of push ups, pull ups and dips, 10 reps per exercise with up to and beyond 40 sets.

Sounds a lot like metabolic conditioning. So if we take this idea and put our own exercises in, but making sure that we hit the whole body, you have a work out that will make you stronger, improve GPP and burn a hell of a lot of calories depending on the exercises and the volume that you do it.

For example, today I did a circuit of one arm chins (2 reps), pistol squats(3-5 reps) and press to handstands (1 rep) for 6 rounds, and i got an effective work out in 20 minutes, and it hit my conditioning as well, jsut doing each exercise one after the other with as little rest as possible.

You can pick any 3 exercises: calisthenics, barbell work, strongman, even some isolation exercises if you want to bring up a lagging body part.

If you are training strength movements, as I am, and still want to train like this, I would recommend adding in a 'spacer exercise' or 2 to help you rest between sets, for example, I was training around the worlds yesterday, with handstand presses (1 rep) and one arm chins (2 reps). I added in a set of bulgarian split squats to help me rest more between sets. A 'spacer exercise' should be relatively easy and can be done for high reps, push ups or skipping are also good exercises



I hope this helps if you are stuck for a workout, remember, be creative, and enjoy the time away from the world, this work out can also really help clear your head.

Enjoy the gains
Alex

One arm lock offs for big dudes

Why the one arm lock off? It puts a tremendous amount of tension on the biceps, it will help improve endurance and work capacity, and it also looks cool as hell to see a big guy pull one of these off. I spent the majority of my first year in college training these. Hopped on to the preacher curl bench and got a 66lb preacher curl with one arm for 30 reps within the next few weeks.

What is a one arm lock off? It is when you hold the top of a one arm chin for time. I know its sounds easy, but just give it a go.you'll find that you get up with 2 arms, let go of one of them and you will drop like a 200 lb man trying to do a one arm lock off. Think about how strong your back and arms are now, now think about how much stronger they will be if you could do a one arm lock off for 10 seconds.

It is also a stepping stone to the one arm chin, which is also an awesome exercise. One of my goals as a personal trainer is to get as many people over 190lb doing one arm chins for reps.

The progression level:

1. Hold each lock off for 5 seconds, at the top (chin over the bar), middle and 3/4 of the chin, this is one rep.
2. To set up, do an archer pull up, with the main arm under hand, and with the other hand is going to hold onto the bar with just the 4 fingers, work your way down to a single finger, then down to just your pinky finger.
3. When you can do each progression level until you can get 5-10 sets of 2 reps, then progress onto the next level.

Once you get down to the pinky it may not be so easy to progress onto the one arm lock off: here are a few ideas to make the final step.

1. Add weight to the lock offs
2. Hang a loop off the bar at shoulder height and use your pinky on the loop to assist the one arm lock off
3. Increase number of reps and sets
4. Only assist yourself on the top of the one arm lock off, only use one arm on the middle and/or bottom holds.

Before you start one arm lock offs, become a monster at 2 arms. see if you can get 100 in 10 mins, at least 12 chins with your chin clearing the bar and 5 sets of 3 frenchies.

Don't forget to train both arms.

Enjoy the gains
Alex

You want a 500 lb bench what??

Here I am going to be laying out my long term upper body strength goals (aim to get this aged 25, so 7 years), for my lower body I have not chosen to have any serious long term goals, I wouldn’t mind being able to dunk within a year, but apart from that I am just going to have fun and see how much I can squat. All of these targets will seem pretty far fetched, but you can’t hit anything without aiming at something. So here they are:
500 lb bench press: I don’t know how much I have to weigh to get this as a natural athlete, or if it has even been done before, for now, my main pushing strength I will be working planche and handstand push ups. But I will incorporate partial bench presses working up to 500lbs and slowly increasing the ROM over the 7 years. But I will be very careful of elbow pain and will progress at a very slow pace, it will not be my primary focus for now.
100 one arm pull ups (50 each side) ok, this one is straight out crazy, Jasper Benincasa could do 25 on each side, alternating arms each rep, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go for twice that,  I am planning on doing this through steady state cycles, slowly increasing the number of reps as the cycles progress. Once I get 10 each side, I may have to get more creative, maybe do some west-side style training, I don’t know, I will think about it closer to the time.

100 Full planche push ups: This is going to be a challenge, I am currently doing crooked planche push ups (below), or about 10 reps, so I will aim to get 100 of those and work from there, to try and get my work capacity up before i do it in harder movements such as the full planche.

120kg strict curl: I am a torso dominant athlete, and so my arms have always lagged behind, After seeing Denis Cyplenkov do it, I thought I had to at least give it a go, I will go over how I plan on doing this in the near future

Enjoy the gains
Alex