Today, I want to discuss the different types of pull up you can do and what the differences are between them. This is the third in my series of 5 articles on pull ups. The previous 2 articles were:
- Introducing pull ups and chins - why they are a good idea and how to do them
- What to do if your shoulder hurts doing pull ups – it may not be the end of the world
Are you ready?
OK. First, let’s chalk up.
If you’re going to do pull ups seriously, then you’re going to need to invest in some chalk. Otherwise, you’re going to rip your hands to pieces. If you try and use gloves you might be OK for a while but, as you increase your volume or weight, you’ll find that your grip starts to slip on the bar and you’ll rotate until your hands are where you don’t want them. And we don’t want that.
The shoulder width chin up
Most people call this a chin up because of the way that the chin tends to come up and over the bar in a curved path. The important point is that the fingertips are facing back towards the body. This means that the biceps are used more effectively than if the fingertips were facing away from the body. The grip tends to be more intuitive for most people, too. This means that this is the easiest of all the pull up variants and is the one you should generally start with.
The narrow grip chin up
Harder than the shoulder width chin up, this move puts more focus on the biceps and less on the lats. It is a good exercise to do if you are trying to improve your chin up strength but are finding that your chin up workouts are getting stale. Swapping between narrow and wide grip chin up workouts for varying sets and reps can provide several years worth of linear improvement (with appropriate deload weeks).
The shoulder width pull up
This is the pull up that everyone thinks of when you say “pull up”. It’s the basic pull up and the one that you’d use if you were climbing out of a ravine or up a tree. Your fingertips are facing away from you, as they would be if you were climbing upwards. It’s definitely harder than the shoulder width chin up and probably slightly harder than the narrow grip chin up.
The narrow grip pull up
This is a slightly more contrived variant, as it is rare that you would need to have your hands so close together when climbing. However, it does make the standard pull up slightly harder and therefore can be used in a routine to develop arm strength.
Elbow flexor pull up
Harder than any of the above pull ups, this is the ultimate in biceps exercises. Despite being a pull up variant and not a chin up, this exercise hits the biceps muscles in a way that is quite unknown to the curls crowd. Do a few of these with 20kg strapped to your waist and you’ll get a pump like you wouldn’t believe. The first week I did these I put about half an inch on my arms.
This is the side view. (Yes, once again we had camera issues and I held this for the best part of an afternoon, which is why I am such an unattractive shade of mauve. And what is that vein doing in my neck? I think I need life insurance…)
Summary
So that’s all the pull up variants that I use (excluding front lever work, which is slightly different). To summarise from easiest to hardest:
- Shoulder width chin – easiest and most intuitive
- Narrow grip chin – slightly harder, more biceps focussed
- Shoulder width pull up – the most functional pull up, a bit harder on the grip
- Narrow grip pull up – harder version of the pull up
- Elbow flexor pull up – hardest version of the pull up, most focus on the biceps
Workouts
The way I use these variants is usually within the following template:
- Workout A: work up to 3RM
- Workout B: sets of reps (6 sets of 2 reps, 5 sets of 3 reps, 3 sets of 5 reps)
The variants can be used to improve as follows:
- progress linearly from 15kg to 20kg with the shoulder width chin, then stall.
- pick up again at 15kg on the narrow grip chin and progress to 20kg, then stall.
- return to 20kg on the shoulder width chin and progress.
- repeat until bored.
Obviously, you could be rotating between shoulder width chins and narrow grip chins on workout A (maxes) and rotating between shoulder grip pull ups and narrow grip pull ups on workout B (reps). After a while, you could change it up and swap the workouts round so that you were using chins on your rep day and pull ups on your max day.
The trick is keeping things fresh but keeping the weight moving up.
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[...] my pull up strength has progressed so far that I could happily play about on the bar trying all the different variants with ease. A big change from a few months ago when that would have still been unheard of for [...]