What is an explosive pull-up?
Explosive pull-ups is when you pull the bar explosively aiming for your chest or lower. If you are interested in explosive pull-ups my guess is that you want to work toward muscle-ups or chest to bar pull-ups as the end goal.
This article will teach you step by step how to build the explosive power needed to unlock your explosive pull-ups as well as your muscle-ups and chest to bar pull-ups.
Do you want to learn the Muscle-up?
How to do explosive pull-ups?
Explosive power is the key to achieving the bar muscle-up or the chest to bar pull-up. But even if you have been training normal pull-ups for years, it doesn’t translate to the kind of explosive power needed. Let’s dive deeper into explosive pull-ups and the most common mistakes I see when trying to build explosive power.
Doing pull-ups with the wrong technique
The most common mistake when training explosive pull-ups is that we are trying to apply our normal pull-up technique to our explosive pull-ups. Let me explain.
The purpose of training explosive pull-ups is to achieve the muscle-up or the chest to bar pull-up as the end goal. Therefore we need to change our pulling technique.
When doing explosive pull-ups you want to use a slightly narrower grip and instead of pulling your elbows back and to the sides like in normal pull-ups, you are pulling with your elbows facing forward in front of you. This will help you to pull up and away from the bar.
For the explosive pull-up, you want to focus on pulling as fast and as high as possible to activate the fast-twitch muscle fibers. Try to touch the bar under your chest or lower in every repetition.
Explosive pull-ups need more recovery time
To be able to be explosive we have to train up the so-called fast-twitch muscle fibers. Fast-twitch muscle fibers provide bigger and more powerful forces, but for shorter durations and fatigue quickly.
The tips I’m giving you here are a part of my FREE muscle-up checklist that includes a bunch of tips and videos as a reminder of the technique. I would recommend using it before every muscle-up workout and you will learn the muscle much faster!
This means that we have to train fewer repetitions with longer rest between sets. A common mistake is not resting long enough between each set and not recovering enough to be able to maximize the potential of each set.
For explosive pull-ups, I recommend resting 5 min between each set. In my experience, this will make you achieve the muscle-up faster even though it might feel like you are wasting your time resting for that long. Use that resting time to work on your mobility like opening up your hips, thoracic spine, or any other mobility drill you need to work on.
Explosive pull-ups take time
Upper body explosiveness like explosive pull-ups is what takes the most time to achieve in my experience. So don’t think that you are doing something wrong if your results are slow. Train your explosive pull-ups two times per week at the most. Training them more won’t make you progress any faster but will just set you up for injuries down the line.
How do I make my pull-ups more explosive?
There are different ways of building the strength needed to be able to do explosive pull-ups. Here I will go through what has worked for me as well as on my clients over the ten years I have been coaching people in calisthenics
Explosive pull-ups and resistance bands
When you apply the technique I mentioned above, I recommend using resistance bands as a way to work on your explosive pull-ups.
Start with a resistance band that allows you to do 5-8 explosive pull-ups where you touch the bar under your chest or lower. Do this for 3-5 sets. When your explosive pull-ups get stronger you just switch to a thinner resistance band and do the same process again.
Clapping pull-ups
Another way of building the explosive power needed to do explosive pull-ups is to do clapping pull-ups. Pull up as explosively as you can and release the bar for a second to be able to clap your hands and grab the bar again. If you don’t have the explosive power to release the bar for that amount of time, just aim to let go of the bar for a split second. This is a great exercise to build the explosiveness needed for the explosive pull-up.
Chest to bar pull-ups
Chest to bar pull-ups is when you pull the bar and touch it on your chest. This is the first step in your explosive pull-up journey. As you get stronger you want to not only pull the bar to your chest but to your belly button and eventually all the way to your waist.
Weighted pull-ups
Depending on your strength level I would also recommend starting your weighted calisthenics as soon as you built a good foundation with your body weight. Invest in a good dip belt to be able to add weight to your primary upper body calisthenics exercises.
A great way of speeding up the strength of your explosive pull-ups is by doing weighted pull-ups. As soon as you can do around 5-10 bodyweight pull-ups it’s time to add some weight. Have the intention to make every repetition explosive. This will build your explosive power and will make you feel much lighter.
Do explosive pull-ups help with muscle-ups?
Yes, explosive pull-ups are the key factor to achieving your first muscle-up or chest-to-bar pull-up.
Explosive pull-ups for muscle-ups
If you can do explosive pull-ups to under your chest or lower you unlock the strength to be able to do muscle-ups. Muscle-ups is an amazing exercise that requires both explosive pulling strength but also to be able to do a so-called straight bar dip.
Explosive pull-ups designed for muscle-ups were the topic of conversation when I spoke to one of my online coaching clients yesterday and I want to share a bit about our conversation with you.
The muscle-up is all about the explosive pull-up. The higher you can pull up, the easier it will be to get over the bar. The 2-point pull-up is designed to make your explosive pull-up higher which is of course great for your muscle-ups and will make the transition much easier.
The first pull is from the bottom as usual. But it isn’t this first pull that takes me all the way to the top. It’s actually the second pull that will give you a boost to get over the bar. The second pull happens somewhere about halfway up. I would recommend practicing this with a resistance band. You can try it with just explosive pull-ups or if you can, with muscle-ups.
The explosive pull-up is not something that you will get overnight. But as with all things, consistency is key. If the muscle-up is your end goal and you feel stuck on the journey toward your first muscle-up, check out my muscle-up coaching.
