This is just a quick post on how my assisted one-arm chin pulley system is set up.
So what is this pulley system?
It’s a pulley attached to my chin up bar. The pulley has a short length of cord running through it. The cord has a carabiner at either end. The system looks like this:
Close up, it looks like this:
So you can see that I have used a small piece of gear cord and a carabiner to attach the pulley to the pull up bar. The gear cord is just tied into a loop using an overhand knot (use a double fisherman’s though, if you have space) and then looped around the bar. The carabiner connects both ends of the loop and also fits through the pulley.
OK, so show me how it works
First, I put my harness on and attach myself to one end of the system. Then, I hang weight plates off the other end using a sling and another carabiner. In the picture below, you can see that I have just used 2 x 10kg plates for the purposes of this demonstration.
When you’re ready, you grab the bar with one hand. Remember to chalk up first! I tend to find that I get the best and most stable grip by holding the bar with my palm rather than my fingers. So I tend to wrap my fingers quite a long way over the bar. You shold be able to see this from the picture below.
Then you stablise yourself. You will find that to start with you may have a tendency to swing from side to side. This will pass with practice. If you need some extra help to start with, use the other hand to touch the wall. To avoid gaining to much help from this extra point of contact, try to just use your fingertips to balance with rather than gripping the corner of the wall or the door edge fiercely.
Finally, you pull yourself up. I find that the movement is hardest at the bottom and that once I get moving, I can generally count on making the rep.
This is a picture of me doing the assisted one-arm chin with the other hand. Since I have space to the side when using this arm, I can put one arm out, which seems to help with balance. I haven’t seen anyone else doing this on one-arm chins, though so it may just be the direction of force that is coming from the pulley in my set up.
If you look at the picture, you will see that the force is not directly upwards but is off to one side. The pulley is set up this way so that the cord doesn’t try to run straight through my leg.
A final word
So that’s the set up. I hope you find it useful.
Please bear in mind that with one-arm chin training that you are putting a lot of force through your elbows. If you’ve got small joints, like me, then you may find that you can only train one-arm chins infrequently.
I find that once per week keeps me a long way from injury and I can probably do twice a week if I really want to. More than that, though, and my elbows start complaining.
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