Chins by Eoin Cashen
It’s not uncommon to walk in to any commercial gym at peak times and see a queue for the Lat pulldown machine. However at the same time the chin-up bar is gathering dust. The reason is simple, CHINS SUCK. Why? Because they are hard! Chins however, are possibly the best exercise you can do for your upper body. Regardless of your training goal chins are the key to success. Chins target the lat’s primarily, but they also hit the biceps and the core muscles as well as the muscles of the upper and middle back. Research has also shown that the pectoral muscles are also worked when doing chins. Ideally the correct term for chin-ups should be chest ups because that essentially is the movement. When you lean back and bring your chest up to the bar you really target the lat’s and squeezes every ounce of benefit from the exercise.
So, how drag yourself away from the lat pulldown to the chin-up bar. To start we need to correct any weakness we may have in the back. A good exercise for this is the Hanging Scapular Retraction. This exercise will help train you to keep your shoulders down and back which will give you better posture. It is also the first part of the movement of the chin-up. If you can hold the retraction for a minimum of 10 seconds then you have decent strength in your back to correctly perform chins.
Once we are happy with our back strength its chin-up time. To start, we will use a neutral grip (palms facing) as that is the easiest to begin with. Then we will begin with negative reps or eccentrics (for you boffins out there). A negative rep means that we will pull or jump if necessary up to the bar and slowly lower ourselves back down. We should be aiming for 20 seconds from top to bottom. 6 sets of about 3 reps is a good starting point.
Right! Time to move on to reps, to begin with you may only be able to do a few. So to increase our reps we are going to use a tempo of 4110 to build on the rep range. This means that we are going to pull ourselves up in 1 second, hold for 1 and lower ourselves in 4 seconds. As soon as we can complete 12 reps we will progress to a shoulder width palms facing or supinated grip. The aim is to increase your reps by 1 every training session. In my next article I will show how to progress your chins and will include some variations to challenge you. Remember Red bull doesn’t give you wings, Chins do!!