Muscle Up Training For Advanced Calisthenics
Why muscle-ups?
A good muscle-up is a great milestone for progress.
It’s an impressive movement that uses a variety of muscles. It’s also a single exercise that puts together the main aspects of your bodyweight strength training: pushing, pulling, and core.
This makes training for your first muscle-up a great way to orient your training and make sure you’re on the right path. You can’t do one if you’ve got any glaring weaknesses, and performing a muscle-up shows you’ve got these essentials locked in.
Muscle-Ups and Kipping
One thing first; the elephant in the room.
When we refer to a muscle-up, it’s without kipping.
If you’re trying to build calisthenic strength, the last thing you want to do is compensate by getting the maximum momentum. The exaggerated swinging doesn’t make you better in the long-run; it takes out the muscular strength and skill of a disciplined muscle-up.
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The goal of the muscle up, in this particular guide, isn’t to use your lower body or spine to generate momentum – it’s to build and demonstrate core and upper back strength.
We want to get some momentum, as we’ll discuss, but a kip is too much, because it’s designed to speed through the movement. We don’t want that.
It’s not about doing 10 as fast as possible, it’s about doing Every. Rep. Properly. That leads to better results in the muscles and progression towards more, stricter muscle-ups. And remember: you can speed up your strict muscle-ups, but kipping muscle-ups won’t improve your strict ones!
The 3 Stages of a Great Muscle-Up
We’re going to break the movement down, because getting better at each of the individual components helps make the muscle-up easier.
While the muscle-up is a single, continuous exercise, it is usually simpler if you think of it as a smooth movement through 3 phases: the pull, transition, and dip.
You want to get stronger around the movement, and practice the skill of it. These exercises will cover both…
1. Core and Setup
Strengthening your hollow position and core strength is also great for keeping your ‘lines’ clean during your muscle-up. This is a technical development that helps you build those long-term, sustainable gains.
If you do it right, the only thing limiting your progress is strength: you’re never wasting time fixing bad habits if you get it right from the start.
Hanging Hollow Hold
The muscle-up cares where your whole body is. Doing it right means maintaining the right positions.
The hanging hollow hold is a simple movement that helps you understand the constant “feet in front of hips” position. This is the position for any great pull-up or muscle-up, and keeps your core engaged throughout.
This position also lets you develop strength specifically in the upper body muscles, since you can’t compensate with the core.
Knee tucks / L-Sit
This takes the feet-forward position of the hollow and allows you to build strength through movement. Once you’re familiar with what the hollow feels like, you need to practice moving towards it – and we use a simple progression for this:
- Knee tucks
- Leg raises
- L-sit
This progression ensures that, however experienced or strong you are, there’s good core training available.
These movements are good because they build the additional core strength you need for the muscle-up. This is crucial because the way you get your first muscle-up brings in momentum from this position, specifically. That means strength here is directly used to get your muscle-up.
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- Extended height: 192cm
- Compact position height: 120cm
- 3-year warranty against manufacturer defects
- Carry bag included
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2. The pull
The pull in a muscle-up isn’t identical to a conventional pull-up. It has you pulling behind the bar then slightly away from it to give you the space to get your chest over, rather than to, the bar.
Muscle-ups also demand a more explosive form of pull-up since you’re trying to get all the way over the bar. This means that the way you think of the pull-up and how you execute each rep can be tweaked to make it better for muscle-ups.
Variations on the pull-up help reinforce these priorities while also building the strength you’ll need.
Chest-to-bar Pull-up hold
If you’re trying to get over the bar, then working into this elbows-back, bar-to-chest pull-up can be a game changer.
Holding the position builds the muscles and control you’ll need without having to rep out extra-long pull-ups. It can be a great strength exercise to strengthen the stabiliser muscles around the shoulder when you’re not quite ready to bang out sets of strict chest-to-bar pull-ups.
You can get into this position with a jump, band, or just after a single long pull-up. Hold for as long as possible, in the position you want to reach in your muscle-up, and fight off lowering yourself.
Mid-Grip Pull-ups
More pull-ups doesn’t always mean better muscle-ups. However, you can’t do a muscle-up without being able to pull yourself up to the bar.
You want to get all the way over – you need some pulling strength. There’s no hard-and-fast number of pull-ups you need, but you’re going to need a strong upper body – both in the pulling and pushing movements.
L-sit pull-up
This is a great way to practice the core positioning and the proper pulling mechanics of a muscle-up. It helps you get used to building momentum with the L-sit to pop yourself up and over the bar.
This also ensures you’re pulling with the correct muscles. You can’t cheat an L-sit nearly as hard as you could with a normal pull-up.
If you’re looking to remove a kip and focus on controlled motivation, the L-sit pull-up is perfect.
3. The transition
This skill is almost entirely unique to the muscle-up. It’s one of the hardest parts to train most of the time, and probably the reason why so many people cannot achieve the muscle-up.
We’ve seen tons of people who can get the speed and height necessary for a muscle-up but fall short with the transition. It’s the difference between under and over the bar, and it’s a skill.
The idea is to practice the transition from the start, whatever level you’re at. These transition exercises all unload your bodyweight slightly while reducing stress on the shoulders.
Jumping MU
Jumping through your muscle-up transition takes a lot of the weight off, allowing complete beginners to practice the movement.
The idea is to feel through the transition, using the jumping motion to give you the momentum you need to get over the bar. If you develop this along with your strength movements, you’ll be far more confident and familiar when the time comes to put it all together.
Foot-supported MU transition
This is a step up from the jumping transition; it puts more of your bodyweight through the upper body. This has you reproduce the same skill as before, but now against more resistance.
This is closer to the kind of experience you’re going to have with your muscle-ups. It combines the benefits of strength work and skill work, making for a great intermediate-level staple for building better muscle-ups.
Banded muscle-ups
One of the easiest ways to start developing your muscle-up is to add a heavy band.
This is a great choice for taking the weight off and – once again – helping build the strength and technique of the pull and transition.
This version is unique because you can actively progress the amount of load you’re taking off in a predictable way. It offers the chance to switch to lighter bands over time, once you begin to feel more confident with the various components of a good muscle-up.
4. The dip
The last thing you want is to get over the bar, and then not be able to finish the movement because you’ve got a weak dip.
It’s a key part of your overall bodyweight strength development, since we all need to practice pushing, pulling, and core exercise. These exercises are all about getting used to the straight-bar dip, rather than on rings or parallel bars.
Dead-start dip
You can perform a straight-bar dip with a little lower-body momentum to start building the strength you need for the full version.
This is like the jumping muscle-up, but for the dip. It takes off the difficulty of the bottom position, allowing you to build better strength and control in the chest, triceps, and shoulders.
This is great if you’re struggling with getting enough dips together to make a set. This easier movement can be key to building the strength you need to improve your dips and the straight-bar dip portion of a muscle-up. You can even use it after straight-bar dips as you get tired.
Straight-bar dip
The last thing you want is to get your chest over the bar and fail in the dip. It’s embarrassing and disappointing at the same time.
Straight-bar dips are perfect for building your muscle-up. They’re specific to the top portion of the muscle-up, and develop strength in the shoulders and upper back to protect the joints.
These are different to the parallel bar dips you might be used to, and they can present a different challenge. You can perform them on the low bar of the pull-up mate 2, or after a jumping muscle-up.
How to improve your muscle-up
Getting better at muscle-ups is more than just these variations and exercises. You need to be deliberate in how you train, too. While the muscle-up process follows most of the same rules as any other type of training, there are some areas you’ll want to focus on.
Or you can watch this vid…
Practice the Turnover Religiously
The transition from under the bar to over it is the defining part of the muscle-up.
It’s also the part you’re probably least experienced in. We don’t do many transitions in other exercises, so practicing it can save you a ton of struggles on your road to a good muscle-up.
You want to make this movement as deliberate as possible. This could be as simple as practicing some jumping transitions every session or warm-up, or as complicated as dedicated sessions – it all depends on your time limits and your experience level.
Learn to Pop
Even a good muscle-up is going to use some momentum, unless you’re a hardcore veteran. Olympic gymnasts can do completely strict muscle-ups, but I don’t think they’re reading this article.
The key is building a muscle-up that uses a little pop from the core and hip flexors, rather than kipping. There’s a huge difference between the two. Practicing a controlled, deliberate pop in the hips combined with the pulling over motion is key – they should be one continuous movement.
You need to get this bit right, and you need to make it a smooth part of your full muscle-up. Practice the pop, and using it to get above the bar, rather than just to it.
Be Deliberate with Strength Work
You want some pop in your muscle-ups, but not in your strength work.
Making the strength work around a strict muscle-up helps prepare your muscles and joints for the movement. Making these exercises easier will make your muscle-up harder, since you’re not setting a strong foundation for it.
Make your pull-ups and bar-dips strict and deliberate. That doesn’t mean slow – you want to move yourself quickly in your pull-up, but that needs to come from the right muscles. No swinging or kipping.
Pull-ups like Muscle-Ups
If you’re trying to build to a muscle-up as your short-term goal, you should practice your pull-ups like you want to pull into the muscle-up. This means you need 3 things:
- The same grip width as your ideal muscle-up position
- Prioritising pulling yourself higher and getting the elbows back/chest forward position
- A focus on speed through the top half of the movement
If you can incorporate these for a while, you’re likely to build to your muscle-up faster than using conventional wide-grip pull-ups. Using this specific type of pull-up, you can practice roughly 2/3 of the muscle-up every single rep.
Focus on Proper Exercise Order
Train the most technically challenging exercises first.
This means transition work is going to be earlier in the session – even as warm-up – followed by more traditional strength exercise like pull-ups and dips.
Be sure to prioritise your banded muscle-ups over straight-bar dips, for example. This leaves you fresh when you need co-ordination and stability the most. After that, you can build that additional strength with pull-ups, dips, and core exercise.
Conclusion
The muscle-up is a complicated movement. And that’s the best and worst thing about it.
It requires strength, good technique, and the ability to control some dynamic movement. It’s no surprise that a lot of people aim for it, or struggle with it – and that’s what makes getting your first muscle-up so cool.
It’s an exercise that – if done properly – shows off the hard work you’ve put in. It’s a good way to round off the development of your pull-ups and core strength, and a great goal to aim for.
If you can put in the work to achieve your first muscle-up, as we’ve described here and in the video, you’re going to be stronger in the most important bodyweight movements. All it takes is a bit of dedication.
