The elusive muscle up is finally tackled

A muscle up is a staple in higher level body weight training.  A muscle up is when you start hanging below the bar and wind up with your body fully extended above the bar.  It is basically a pull up into a dip.  Sounds simple? It isn’t.

I have been working towards getting a muscle up for at least two years.  For the first year or so my progress kept getting retarded by chronic tendonitis that I finally was able to tame with regular forearm stretching.

In recent months I have made some nice strength gains, repping out 20 + pull ups for the first time in my life.  I still however had not been able to get a muscle up, despite having the apparent prerequisite strength to do so.

My body dynamics are not ideal for a muscle up.  My long arms and even longer legs seem to have a mind of their own at times.  When you are first learning a muscle up they advise you to do a kipping variety where you use a combination of body swing and leg movement to help propel you up and over the bar.

Well my brain seems to short circuit when it comes to kipping.  If anything it seemed to hurt me, my long legs would wind up extended in front of me which pulled my upper body away from the bar instead of towards it.  Even with my bad kipping, I was getting real close to getting over the bar.

The past couple days I was doing some static high holds at the gym.  Because I have some pretty hellacious calluses and blister remains on my hands I was doing this with a false grip where your wrist is basically sitting on the bar.  I noticed that I was able to hold myself about nipple high for at least 10 seconds.  In order to do a muscle up you only need to get a few inches higher.  I thought it was good I could hold the position that high, it meant I was getting closer.

Well today at the gym I would normally be doing a 300 but I instead opted to just do body weight work to give my knee a break.  I wore my lifting gloves with integrated wrist wraps for hand protection.  The wrist wraps also made the false grip a little less uncomfortable.

I warmed up with some regular pulls ups and then did some bar dips as well.  The bar I normally use was taken when I went back so I headed over to one of the cable machines that has a small bar on top of it, about six and a half feet high.  The narrow bar required my hands to be very close together to do a false grip, no more than 8 or 9 inches apart.

So I hung down, pulled up and realized I was right at the muscle up make or break spot, I was very surprised I was able to slowly power through that upper section.  However with the base of the machine only a couple feet from the bar I didn’t have any room for my legs to move so I just held that high position.

Well I was really encouraged now, I was so close I could smell it.  I went back to the smith machine and grabbed the cross support I have used in the past to do jumping, assisted muscle ups.  I hung down, picked my feet up and pulled slowly.  With nothing blocking my feet I was able to get just a bit higher.  I was then able to use a one hand at a time technique to get up and finally over the bar! I was f’ing stoked!

I couldn’t believe that my first muscle up was a narrow grip, no kip, power muscle up.  That just isn’t how your first muscle up is supposed to be.  I never have been very conventional in most of my athletic endeavors so I guess my first muscle up should follow the same suit.

I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke so I did the same thing on two other spots, including the “high” bar I prefer to use for pull ups.  I walked out of the gym pumped up, unfortunately there was nobody there that would really appreciate the acheivment so I resorted to just yelling YES!!!!!!!!!!!!! at the top of my lungs when I was in the truck.

I can hardly wait to do the move on my bars this weekend on video.