However, I would say that unless you’re a very big man, you’ve probably got a half-way decent chance of getting one.  Why do I say that?  Well, I’m nothing special and I’ve got one.  I haven’t suffered particularly to get one.  It was fun training and I never really got hurt or injured. 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OT5UkfHRU

This isn’t the world’s greatest example of a one-arm chin because I don’t do it from a complete dead-hang and there is a fair amount of kicking on the way up!  Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be working on those points.  Because, hey, nobody’s perfect…

Anyway, this is my brief guide to getting a one-arm chin.  I am sure there are lots of other ways but this one worked for me.

Start with regular two-arm pull ups and chins

Grow to love regular chin ups and pull ups.  I mean really love them.  You have to create a base for your body to build on and doing them a couple of times a week just isn’t going to cut it.  For more on pull up training, check out my articles:

• How to do more pull ups
• How to do different variants of pull ups and chins

Build a great weighted chin

I think this is the key to developing both the muscular size and the tendon strength that you need to ultimately get a solid on-arm chin.  I suspect that trying from day one to put all of the stress on one arm by doing assisted one-arm chins is going to cause two problems.

• First, you are going to get tendonosis at your elbow.
• Second, you are going to struggle to use enough weight to cause hypertrophy, which means you are stuck with neural development, which is great but not as good as having both.

You can build up your weighted pull up and chin strength using a harness to hold more weight.  Check out my article on building a weighted pull up for more details.

I worked up to doing 75% bodyweight for a 3RM before I started training one-armed but I guess if you are in a hurry then 50% might be OK.  Just for clarity, that means if you weigh 80kg (175lbs) then you should be able to do three chins with 40kg (90lbs) strapped to your behind.

Start doing assisted one-arm chins

You can use a pulley system to take weight off when you start doing one-arm work.  Check out my article on how to do an assisted one-arm chin for more details on what I do and how to set up the pulley system.

I started by taking off 25% of bodyweight, which is 20kg (45lbs) if you weigh 80kg (175lbs).  I found that multiple sets of singles with a minute’s rest twice a week gave me the best results with little elbow pain.

I found that multiple sets of doubles twice a week gave me a little elbow pain but nothing major.  Triples even once per week really beat me up, though.

Keep your weight down

You have to keep your weight down.  When I start adding muscle/fat in the winter, I lose my one-arm chin immediately.  I also get my best increases in pulling strength when I cut weight.  You have to remember that this is a relative strength exercise and trying to bulk up while working for a one-arm chin is silly and will lead to pain and suffering.

Be patient

Ultimately, you just have to be patient and work hard and consistently without overdoing it.  In time, the strength will come to you.

Best of luck…

Anyway, I’m doing lots of soft tissue work to try and sort it out but I figured it would be useful to do some extra rowing movements to try and speed the rehab process along.  Lots of people talk about the benefits of face pulls so I applied myself in my Garage Gym to rigging a system up.

Garage gym set-up for face pulls

You can see from the picture below that I’m using the same basic pulley system that I use for assisted one-arm chins.  It has a climbing pulley attached to my pull up bar using a carabiner and a small piece of gear cord.  The cable is made also out of climbing gear cord, as it doesn’t stretch.  This cable is then attached to weights plates at one end using another carabiner and a sling and to my hands at the other end using another sling.

This is the start of the movement:

And this is the end of the movement.  The black sling you can see between the end of the gear cord and the sling attached to the weights plates is just to extend the gear cord such that the weights plates are just about on the ground at the bottom of the rep.  This is my weak nod in the direction of risk management…

What I’m doing

I’m doing a couple of light sets of 20 reps with c. 20kg after my soft tissue work in the evenings.  Interestingly, the groove is a little elusive.  Sometimes I find myself having to concentrate quite hard on keeping my lower back flat.  Other times I have to concentrate on stopping my upper back from rounding during the movement.  Sometimes I get this great sensation of my shoulder-blades moving together at the end of each rep.  It’s changeable.

They also seem to affect what my body does on other exercises.  I tried some presses with the bar the other night to see how my shoulder was getting on and suddenly felt much more rear delt engagement than normal. 

In short, I’m developing kinesthetic awareness of what my back and arms are doing, which is good, but I’m not there yet, which is bad.  I’ll keep you posted on how they work out.

When I do collapse into a mountain hut or at the side of the road, it tends to be in a slouch.  Consequently, when I get back, I need to have a programme that will get me back up and functioning fairly quickly so I feel confident about hitting my squats and deadlifts in the gym.

***

My core stability progressions

I’ve used the following sequence a few times and it generally gets me up and running after a week or so.  Each phase of exercises includes a glute exercise, an abdominal exercise and a squat pattern.  I do each phase for a few days to a week until I feel comfortable doing it.

For the glute strength and abdominal exercises, I’ll generally do 15 – 20 reps and 2 sets.  For the squat patterns, I’ll generally do just 5 – 10 reps or until they feel natural.

PHASE ONE

Glute bridges

Lying on your back, you clench your glutes and push your hips towards the ceiling.  Hold the bridge for a couple of seconds to really activate the glutes.

Leg lowering

This looks so easy until you try and do it properly, i.e. without allowing your lower back to come away from the floor.  You lie on your back and extend both legs slightly so that you form a sitting position but horizontally, like in the first picture below.

Now try extending one leg slightly, while tensing your abdominal muscles.  When you feel your lower back start coming away from the floor, stop and pull your leg back slightly.  Pause for a moment and then try the other leg.

Plate squats

As it says on the tin, you squat while holding a plate.  Only go as deep as you can safely without rounding the lower back.  A friend who can shout when your lower back rounds comes in handy here.  The key is to counter-balance your rear end with a small weight so that you can easily sit back and therefore create hip drive.

PHASE TWO

One-leg glute bridge

Just like the two leg glute bridge, this exercise starts with both feet on the floor.  Then, you raise one leg up straight.  Finally, you use the leg in contact with the floor to raise yourself off the ground.

Two-leg lowering

Like the one-leg lowering, you start this exercise with both feet off the ground.  This time, though, you lower both legs together, while keeping the lower back in contact with the ground.

Goblet squat

Dan John has made these popular and I have only recently starting investigating them myself.  However, they are clearly a good way to teach people to squat with good form, keeping a flat back, shins perpendicular to the floor and chest out.  I can feel that my body is doing good things when I practice them…

PHASE THREE

Weighted glute bridge

These are just like the unweighted glute bridges I mentioned above.  But with weight.  Start on the floor with the weight over your hips.  I have never tried doing these with anything other than a barbell but I imagine you could use any weight so long as you could position it over your hips.

Hanging leg raises

You can do straight-legged hanging leg raises from a pull-up bar.  If you can’t do leg raises, you can substitute these with knee raises.

Pistol off box

Doing pistols off a box is much more comfortable for my lower back as the easier angle means that there is less lumbar rounding.  In the picture below, I am using some weight to make the exercise harder.  I am lazy, so I just grab plates but you could just as easily use dumbbells to increase the weight incrementally.

I like to do these phases so that I do one phase a week for three weeks, a couple of times a week.  After that, I figure I’m probably fine again.  It doesn’t stop me squatting and deadlifting in the meantime, but, hey, nobody’s perfect…

Since I have a desk job and have had a desk job for around 10 years, I had found that my hip mobility was poor and that my body had worked around it by increasing my lower back mobility.  I did plenty of stretching, soft tissue work, activation drills and strengthening exercises to improve. 

Ultimately, the programme worked well and I was able to go back to squatting again recently.  My squat depth is now good (around 12″) and I feel a lot better when doing most of my other exercises too.

Ongoing soft tissue work

However, I have found that if I don’t do soft tissue work regularly, I start to slip back into old patterns and find myself growing uncomfortable under the bar in the squat rack.

I never want to get to the point where I can’t squat again, so I have started doing a programme of soft tissue maintenance daily.

What you need

For this programme, I use a hard ball, (I have a baseball and a hockey ball, which I use for slightly different purposes) and a foam roller.  These are my tools of torture:

The key areas

My key areas to roll are (in order):

• Plantar fascia – hockey ball
• Tensor fascia lata (TFL) – foam roller
• Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris) – foam roller
• Adductors, sartorius and pectineus – foam roller
• Calves – foam roller
• Glutes – hockey ball
• Psoas – hockey ball
• Rhomboids – baseball
• Rotator cuff – baseball
• Front deltoid and shoulder capsule – baseball

Choose the order carefully

I like to use the above order because it works well for moving from one exercise to the next.  I walk into the spare room and tread straight onto the hockey ball to hit my plantar fascia.  Then, I grab the foam roller and lie down on it to roll my right TFL.  Switching sides, I usually roll my quadriceps before doing the left TFL and my adductors.  Sitting up, I roll my calves and then chuck the foam roller away.

All that take me about 5 minutes.  It’s not a 5 minutes out of my day that I would willingly give up.

After that, I grab the hockey ball and roll my glutes (actually, I usually just do the right one) and my psoas.  At this point, I’ve finished the lower body part of my rolling programme.  Doing the lower body first is a guarantee that it gets done.  Then I move onto my upper body.

My upper body trigger points are very swimming specific but I suspect that sitting at a desk typing all day aggravates them something awful.  I find that I get knotted up in my rhomboids, my rotator cuff and my (left) front deltoid.  Using the baseball (because it doesn’t slip like the smoother hockey ball) I get around here in as long as I need to.  Some days, that takes 10 minutes, other days I take 20 minutes.  I usually let the ball settle onto a knot and then apply pressure until I feel the knot yield slightly.  Then I move the ball around a bit.

It hurts but I wouldn’t stop doing it if you paid me.

I think, overall, the key is finding the trigger points that are where the knots have developed and attacking them mercilessly.

Plantar fascia

This is a great place to roll and I am evangelical about getting all and sundry to do it.  It’s a pretty essential technique for when you’ve been doing a lot of walking.  I take a ball with me on walking holidays and when I remember to use it, it pays dividends.  I use a hockey ball nowadays, but when I started out I just used a tennis ball.

Tensor fascia lata (TFL)

Rolling this part of my leg used to be the most horrible experience in the world for me.  However, I found that if I rolled it every day for a couple of days, it slowly got less and less painful.  Now, rolling it every day, it’s usually pain-free.  If I leave it a couple of days, it starts to make me wince again and if I leave it a week, it really makes me grunt.  It’s great motivation for rolling regularly!

Quadriceps (mainly rectus femoris)

The trick to rolling your quadriceps is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”. 

Sartorius, pectineus and adductors

This is an area that I have always rolled but have never really managed to improve significantly.  I can feel that there is some tightness here, which improves a little with rolling but not much.  If anyone has any tips on these, I’d be interested to hear them.

Calves

Like for the quadriceps, the trick to getting value for money out of rolling the calves is to roll each leg separately.  I have found that if I roll both legs together then I get off quite easily and it doesn’t really hurt that much.  Rolling each leg separately makes the experience a lot more “effective”.  When I first started a programme of rolling, I didn’t bother with my calves.  Recent walking holidays have revealed to me that the slight pain I get behind my right knee after a week’s hard mountain walking is entirely due to knots in my calf.  A hard rolling session later and I am pain-free.

Glutes

I never used to roll my glutes at all until I felt that my squat pattern wasn’t quite level.  I monitored how my hips felt as I descended into the hole and realised that my right glute felt tight.  I rolled it using a hockey ball and the change in the way my glutes, lower back and groin area felt was quite remarkable.  Needless to say, I always include some rolling time in for my glutes now.

Psoas major

This is a great little trigger point that really makes a difference to my squat pattern.  If I find a knot here, my squat immediately improves the moment I get rid of it.  It’s a bit hit-and-miss, though, whether it gets knotted up.

Rhomboids

I suspect that my history with these is swimming related but I would be intrigued if other people also have trouble with them.  My knots are pretty substantial when they develop.  They kind of feel crab apple-sized…

Rotator cuff

These feel like steel ropes most of the time until I apply some heavy doses of baseball to them (poetic, given that baseball pitchers often have rotator cuff trouble).  They take some punishment before they start to soften up but when they do my whole shoulder girdle settles down.

Front deltoid

This may be another area that is particularly bad for me, as it’s only my left shoulder that is troubled.  Again, however, it’s a pretty substantial knot that I tend to have to deal with if it flares up.

And that’s it at the moment.  If I find somewhere else starts getting tight and uncomfortable then I’ll start rolling that…

That doesn’t mean that you won’t have heard of them but hopefully they won’t be so familiar that there isn’t a tip here somewhere that might help.  And as you might expect, most of the tips relate to doing the exercises in the limitations of your own garage gym. 

OK, I get the idea.  So what have you covered so far?

These are some of the exercises I’ve covered so far, along with the reasons why:

The weighted pistol - I think many people write the pistol off as a bodyweight only exercise (in fact I know they do and it really gets my goat).  But it’s actually really simple to load up with dumbbells or kettlebells.  The advantage is that you take the load off the lower back while really working the legs.  In this post, I link to a number of basic pistol tutorials and show you how to load up easily.

Farmers’ walks - These are under-rated by many people and are actually really hard to do with proper weight.  In this post, I’ve covered how to improvise your own farmers’ walk bars quite quickly using easy to obtain climbing equipment.

The assisted glute-ham raise - As I show you in this post, I think there are two easy ways to make your own glute-ham raise set-up.  One, using resistance bands and a pull up bar.  And two, using two pull up bars, a pulley and some cord.

Lumberjack squat - For ages, I kept Googling this exercise and never found very much about it.  So one day I just put it in my programme and it works really well.  It’s brutal, makes you keep your chest up when squatting and doesn’t load the spine.  I couldn’t ask for more.  See my pictures (in a very tasteful red T-shirt) as well as a crucial tip for adding extra weight in this post.

Assisted one-arm chins - If you want a one-arm chin, then this post shows you the easiest and most elbow-friendly way to do it.  I don’t believe you can do it just loading up weighted chins (and I speak from experience). 

The floor press  – I tried this exercise for the first time recently and thought that there was a lot of mileage in it.  Besides, it’s one of the good oldtime strongman movements.  I did a post on it because many people think that it’s a hard movement to set up in any gym without a really good power rack, let alone a garage gym.  I found that with two plyometric boxes and a certain amount of wilful determination it can be done.

Zercher squats - Another exercise I only tried recently and one I’m still getting the hang of.  It’s very much like the lumberjack squat but the stresses seem to fall in a different place.  One to watch and learn from, I feel.

The viking press - This is an exercise I used to do quite a lot and then for some reason abandoned in favour of more conventional presses.  I’m coming back to it now for the sake of variety more than anything.

So there you have it.  Eight slightly off-the-wall exercises perfect for the garage gym.  There’s nothing there that costs more than a few bob to make, buy or scrounge.

If you want to check out the viking press in the wild, in its natural habit of strongman competitions, you can see it here:

• as the first event in this Critical Bench meet report; and here
• in DIY form at Straight to the Bar

Otherwise, here is my version of the viking press.

The viking press: equipment

For the viking press, you don’t need a lot of equipment.  Just a bar, a few weights plates, a dumbbell handle and a climbing sling.  You can attach the sling to the dumbbell handle using a lark’s foot knot (see my post on the farmer’s walk bars for further details).  The sling is then twisted onto the barbell as if applying a tourniquet.

This is the end view.

This is the side view.  You can see that the bar is resting on two 12″ plyometric boxes (home made) and a couple of bricks for extra height.  In the background you can see my climbing wall (home made), a fat bar (home made) and sledgehammers (sorry, not home made).

The viking press: a basic primer

This is the starting position of the viking press.  Having seen last week’s photos of me doing the zercher squat, where I had about eleven chins, I am quite pleased that I don’t seem to be quite as fat here.  I think perhaps I was taking the whole “chin tuck” thing a bit far…

This is the finishing position of the viking press.

There it is.  I haven’t used it much.  I used a one-arm version for a while but I didn’t like the effect.  It felt a lot like the one-arm overhead dumbbell press, which is a nice strength exercise but does very little for muscle growth.  I’ll be interested to see how this can be loaded up.

As always, if you’ve got another version of the same exercise or you try this one, please let me know.

The zercher squat: equipment

To do them, I used the fat bar that I made a few weeks ago.  I read somewhere that a larger diameter bar makes the lift less painful on the arms.  I’m glad I did because it wasn’t the nicest sensation even with the bigger bar!

My rack doesn’t go very low so I used the 12″ plyometric boxes that I made in the summer and a few bricks to get the right height.  It’s a similar set up to the one I used when I did the floor press for the first time recently.

And that’s it.  Not really very sophisticated but it works and I’m happy.

The zercher squat: a basic primer

This is me having set up the boxes and the bricks so that the bar is just above my knees.  My upper back is curving over slightly so I’ll have to keep an eye on it but I’m fairly happy with the depth and I don’t think I’m pushing myself into position to get it.  

You can see that from this position, I can slide my arms underneath the bar and clasp my hands together on the other side.  I’ve seen the zercher done without clasping the hands together but this feels most natural to me.  So I’ll do it this way unless I find that it causes a problem that I haven’t thought of yet.

Then I just stood up.  I found that, as long as I got into the right position at the bottom, the hip drive came naturally.  It’s definitely easier to master than the front squat (which still eludes me to proper depth) or the back squat (which I am nearly there with).  It’s similar to the lumberjack squat but the stresses are in slightly different places.  I’m still curving over a little at the top but I think that’s more a function of looking at the bar than anything else.

Here you can see the bar position most clearly.  It really is just as uncomfortable as it looks.

So that’s it.  The zercher squat.  I’m going to start rotating it into my routine and see what happens.  I’m not sure whether it will be as brutal as the lumberjack squat but only time will tell.

I started thinking about ways to improve it last year and did some research on how to increase my bench, which yielded some interesting results.  I looked at the T-Nation T-Cell to see what methods they recommended.  Most of them suggested developing triceps strength using close grip benches and rack lockouts.

It’s great advice but since without much training my dip is quite happy at around 150kg (70kg plus 80kg bodyweight), I’m not really convinced that lockout is my weak area.  I think my weakness is more at the midpoint.

***

Enter the floor press

I’ve wanted to try the floor press for a while.  It has a good reputation for hitting the midpoint of the bench press but it’s also a great oldtime strength movement that preceded the bench press.

Most people will come across this exercise in gyms using a power rack but it is possible to set up something at home.  This is how I did it.

***

Step 1: take two plyometric boxes

I made my 12″ plyometric boxes last summer (I will get around to doing a post about them as they’re really easy to make if you get your wood pre-cut at the DIY store).  I put a weight plate on each one to protect them from the bar coming down.  That takes them up to about 14″ off the floor, which is a bit high for a floor press.  More like a rack lockout, really.

Step 2: add bricks

I use bricks to make the base of a platform

Step 3: add some chipboard

I use these pieces of chipboard for all kinds of things.  They come in really handy when I need to reduce the distance between me and the bar or increase the range of motion on a deadlift.  I like having them around.  Hard to take with you to a commercial gym, though…

Step 4: you’re done!

That’s it!  Here’s a couple of photos of me using my new fat bar to test out the set up.

Other resources

If you’re interested in this great oldtime strength exercise, you can read more about it at these sites:

• Critical Bench – the floor press by Ben Tatar – some good hints and tips as well as technical comments from the experts.
• Weightlifting discussion – the floor press - some good pictures as well as a variant using a back pad.
• Elite FTS - the floor press and its applications - more technical discussion as well as first-hand commentary from a lifter who has incorporated the floor press into his programme for powerlifting
• Mike Robertson – the floor press - Mike gets technical and explains how the floor press benefits your bench.  He also laments the fact that most gyms don’t have the equipment for doing them.  Well, now you can get ahead of the rest with this set-up in your garage!

If you already do the floor press and have another method for doing it at home I’d be interested to hear about it.  Otherwise, if you try this approach, please let me know how it goes.

It’s also a sneaky introduction for me to the world of embedding video into my blog so please bear with me while I get used to the technical side of things!

***

So, what is this RDL of which you speak?

The Romanian Deadlift is a deadlift performed from the top position downwards rather than from the ground upwards.  It is performed with a slight bend in the knees and most of the movement comes from the hips.  To perform it, you think about pushing your behind back rather than bending forwards. 

This is a short video of me doing RDLs for the first time.  Unfortunately, I seem to have uploaded the video sideways.  I’ll try and make sure this doesn’t happen again! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_WFiE4sfM4

***

That looks hard.  Why bother?

Most people associate the RDL with hamstring development and I’ll be happily taking any increases in hamstring strength that come along for the ride.  My purpose in using the RDL, though is to help with my deadlift and back squat by strengthening my lower back.  This will hopefully enable me to hold my torso more upright during the starting portion of the deadlift.  I’m also hoping it will enable me to increase my stability in the hole in the back squat and therefore keep proper form.

***

Where can I find out more?

There are some great resources out there on the Romanian Deadlift.  Here are just a few:

• Bodybuilding.com article by Paul San Andres 
• IronMan Magazine article by Bill Starr
• T-Nation article by Mike Robertson

If you know of any other articles out there about this exercise, please do let me know.  I am looking to improve my form and performance on this lift as much as I can in 2010.  For me, this year is going to be mostly about my lower back.

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.