Clean Up Your Muscle Up
The Bar Muscle Up has made its name virtually the top of the list of calisthenic movements. It's known for giving you street credit! Even though it's not the hardest exercise in the bodyweight world and does help you to improve on routines, show off your strength, and even help connect with other people, it can serve as a few other caveats.
Serves as a tool for training shoulder extension in a dynamic fashion
Opens the door for other advanced muscle-up variations that can help build some tremendous strength and carry over to the exercises.
The Muscle-up via rings or bar does condition the elbows for rigorous pulling and pushing exercises such as back lever and planche work. This is not a guarantee that it will have a 100 percent carryover in achieving those moves.
Steps To Refining The Exercise
Skip The Kip
Avoid Making Contact With The Bar Via Chest Or Stomach
Watch out for those elbows. Keep them straight in the hang position
Bodyweight Training Index
Below is the ring muscle-up
I advise all to have adequate exposure to ring dips, ring pull-ups, and attain a very good ring support hold, both in the neutral and rings turned out position. The limiting factor with this movement is the transitional phase. Having pure raw strength is indeed a great thing to have, and a vast majority of people who have the basics can achieve this skill relatively quickly. Practicing the peek-a-boo phase as detailed in the video will make this movement much more attainable. Once achieved, I do recommend spending some time on this movement, but not that much. The reason for this is that people can get caught up in this movement and hit a wall real soon when it comes to advancing in other higher-level skills. Get the ring muscle-up so that transitioning into other movements can be seamless. It is essentially the gateway to furthering your skillset. Those in favor of wanting to keep things simple, the ring muscle-up, especially done for reps, does give a hell of a pump. Try out this routine at some point 💪🏿💪🏿 5 Ring muscle-ups 6-8 ring dips with or without a turnout 6-8 ring pull-ups with a supinated grip the objective is to never let go of the rings or have your feet touch the floor #semetfitness #ringmuscleup #bodyweighttraining
Above and Beyond The Muscle Up
We can go many ways in further developing the muscle-up. Weight, variation speed, etc. Due to the nature of this exercise being primarily a transitional phase technique, I do believe the right way to go with this is to pursue variations that make the transition phase so from pull up to shoulder extension i.e, elbows behind you, and then to the dip that much more difficult.
In other words, there is no need in my eyes to add weight unless you're a competitor in Streetlifting.
One Arm Ring Assisted Muscle Up
One Arm Straight Ring Muscle Up 📚 It should be noted that using your straight arm puts a great deal of extra stress on your shoulder joint. During this exercise, your shoulders may fatigue to the point that strain is placed on the rotator cuff muscles. Do not push past discomfort! My advice for movements that put you at a mechanical disadvantage or require that big extra push !!!! Go slow and try applying long rest periods.
A method that I enjoy with low rep movements is sets of 1 via accumulations. Essentially, pick an honest and realistic number and try to accumulate it in as many or as few sets as possible. This is a great method for hypertrophy or refining skills. Sets of 8 × 3 are another way to improve on a stubborn exercise that takes a long time to get quality results. 📝 To work for this movement, I suggest training your archer chin-ups, mixed grip pull-ups, pushing movements, handstand push-ups, and ups ring dips.
Eccentric one-arm chin-ups or eccentric archer chins work well when pursuing such feats. If you're working unilaterally, I'll tell you right now. 1 side will always be stronger. It doesn't mean you have an imbalance that's going to rob you of your gains, nor are you predisposed to injury. We tend to think that everything has to be evened out. Should I train my right spleen then??? 🧠
Final Thoughts: Truth be told, if you want to advance your training and are looking to expand your advanced training... Then cool you can try this out. However, it doesn't need direct training, and the carryover to other skills isn't vast.
If you want more complexity and truly want to test your capabilities, try the reverse muscle-up. I was messing around with this, and then I realized mid curl transition that I was on top of the rings. From there, I slowly just kept pushing. This was my first attempt at doing this, so the form is not impeccable.
Hopefully, this article sheds some light on where to go with your muscle-up and raises the question of whether it is even worth it. There are many ways to build strength and hypertrophy via bodyweight training. Do not think that muscle-ups are the only way.
More Content On The Subject is coming soon.
Coach Semet
