Channel: Christopher Walker

Category: Education

Tags: muscle up formhow tomuscle up progressionumzumuscle up tutorialcalisthenics motivationconvict conditioning workoutcalisthenics workout for beginnersconvict conditioning resultschristopher walkercalisthenics workoutdear chrismuscle up techniquemuscle ups for beginnersthink againconvict conditioning reviewconvict conditioning 2muscle up crossfit

Description: In today's episode of Dear Chris, the question is from Dan H and he's asking how we can increase his muscle-up reps. So Dan asked, he asked about increasing reps on muscle-ups. He said he's basically gotten to the point with his muscle-ups where he can get to about five by five. So he's doing five sets of five reps of muscle-ups, but he'd like to figure out how he can increase the amount of reps in that session. The thing about muscle-ups that a lot of people notice when you're doing muscle-ups, once you get to that threshold, that rep threshold that you can go to, you're done. You can't do a whole lot else. And this is something that I've been talking about for many years about the cool thing about calisthenics movements like muscle-ups or weighted calisthenics movements like weighted dips, weighted chin-ups, that sort of stuff, is that they're self-limiting. And I think that's actually a good thing for training because the self limiting capacity of doing these calisthenic movements actually ends up preserving your hormonal profile. If you're training this way, you get a good anabolic response from them but you can't really go... you can't do too much as opposed to a lot of other training methods where you can overdo it because there's no self limiting element to it. You can just push through it and you can do too much. Especially if people are overtraining in general, it can lead to an unfavorable hormone profile with too high of cortisol over time. So the cool thing about calisthenics is that they are self-limiting, and when you get to that last rep on your muscle-ups you definitely can't do any more and then you got to rest, try it again. So that's a benefit. Now in terms of increasing reps on muscle-ups, what I've done... The most muscle-ups I've ever done in row is I think 15. This was back when I lived in New York city. I was doing them daily. In New York city there's a cool culture in the parks around the city that's like a calisthenics culture and I actually lived really close to the park where all the bar stars guys and all those guys were there. [inaudible 00:02:21]. So it was fun. I got to meet those guys and train with them and it would just kind of be... We would show up and I would roll over there and some days people would be there doing stuff. Other days they weren't. But one thing you notice about that culture of the calisthenics community, they train very often and it's kind of this idea of like greasing the groove, which... Where did I first hear about that? I think it was the Russian kettlebell dude that was talking about that. And then I read the Convict Conditioning book and he was talking about it. With calisthenics, body weight stuff, greasing the groove is extremely useful and it's this that you train often on the same movement and what happens, especially if you're trying to break through some sort of plateau or learn a new movement and get good at it quickly, it's more about just frequency of it and not necessarily doing too many of them, because you can't really, they're self-limiting, but just doing it often so that your muscles really get into this groove, which is why they call it that. And you find that you could do it for a period of a few weeks, where you're greasing the groove almost daily. Just anytime you walk by something, just jump up and try to do muscle-ups on it. Just keep going like that. It actually rather quickly builds this muscle memory in your body that doing more reps or doing increasingly more difficult calisthenics movements actually become simpler. Your body gets used to it quickly. It adapts. Your body's at great at adapting and overcoming increased resistance or new things. So a lot of times with these scenarios your body needs to develop different types of muscle groups or smaller muscles for calisthenics than it usually would in a weight room for example. So that's one thing I would recommend doing, is just doing muscle-ups more often than just reserving them for your training session. If you're walking by a playground, pop up there, do some. The other way to increase reps I've found very effective is just adding weight to the muscle-ups, where it's similar to doing weighted chin ups or weighted pull ups or weighted dips. Once you become extremely strong at doing weighted calisthenics, you can actually do just body weight ones with no effort at high reps. Building up on my way to chin ups and weighted pull ups and stuff, I can basically never train for reps on on chin ups or pull ups. But I know I could still pop up and do 40 reps of stuff. I did that in the Austin's Fittest Man competition two years ago.