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What's up guys, Jeff Cavalier, Athleanx.com.
Learn the 10 most common pull-up mistakes and how to fix them to improve your form, strength, and reps with expert tips from ATHLEAN-X™.
Key Takeaways
- Use shoulder-width grip and proper hand positioning to target the right muscles.
- Engage the whole body and maintain tightness for efficient movement.
- Elbows should be positioned in front for better lat activation and shoulder health.
- Maintain thoracic extension to avoid losing mechanical advantage at the top of the pull-up.
- Correcting these common mistakes can help you do more pull-ups immediately.
What the video covers
- Proper hand placement is crucial: use shoulder-width grip to engage lats, avoid too narrow or too wide grips that shift load improperly.
- Strengthen the brachialis and forearms with reverse hammer curls to support pull-up performance without over-relying on them.
- Grip the bar by squeezing hands inward rather than pulling straight down to activate chest muscles and improve body tightness.
- Maintain total body tightness by engaging calves, quads, glutes, and abs to prevent energy leaks and increase pull-up efficiency.
- Position elbows in front of the body within the scapular plane for better lat stretch, shoulder comfort, and biomechanical advantage.
- Avoid caving in the chest at the top of the pull-up; maintain thoracic extension to preserve mechanical advantage and strength.
- Focus on full-body engagement and proper form rather than just pulling down to maximize pull-up reps and reduce injury risk.
- Small adjustments in grip, elbow positioning, and body tension can lead to immediate improvements in pull-up performance.
- Ignoring these common mistakes can limit progress regardless of current pull-up ability level.
- Incorporate corrective exercises and mindful technique to build strength and perform pull-ups more effectively.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Today we're talking about pull-ups and my one and only goal for you by the time this video is over is to make sure you're not only doing them right, but you're doing more of them.
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And I don't care if you're very advanced and you're doing a lot of pull-ups right now, or if you struggle to even do one.
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If you avoid the 10 things I'm showing you here and adopt the alternatives that I'm going to show you, I promise you, you're going to start doing more pull-ups starting right away.
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So, let's get right into the first one here.
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Your hand placement.
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All right, so the first thing you want to make sure you're not messing up is your grip.
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And I'm talking about the width.
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Don't go too wide and don't go too narrow.
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Narrow is where most people screw this up.
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You want to be right here at about shoulder width apart.
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If you go in, as you see my hands starting to creep in here, you dramatically shift the load from the back and the lats to right here, the brachialis and the forearms.
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Which are ill-equipped to handle your body weight repetition after repetition in a pull-up.
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When I get my arms in front of my body, I'm essentially creating some version of a reverse barbell curl.
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Except this time, instead of curling a barbell up, I'm curling my body up to a bar.
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It doesn't matter, the muscles recruited are the same.
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And if you get those hands a little bit wider, just outside of shoulder width, you're going to be in the perfect position to do the pull-up.
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And recruit the muscles best equipped to do this job.
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Now that being said, the brachialis is a muscle that is going to participate in the pull-up.
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We just don't want it to be the primary focus of the pull-up.
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So what I want you to do is stop ignoring the value of this muscle when it comes to performing the overall move.
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Right, it still needs to be strong.
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We just don't want it to be the driver of the movement.
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So, are you doing enough to strengthen this muscle?
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Are you doing enough of these?
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Reverse hammer curls.
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Really kind of in this pronated position to really recruit those muscles.
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Are you doing enough of these to get a stronger forearm?
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If you're not, I guarantee you just by incorporating a few sets a week into your normal plan right now, you're going to get stronger brachialis and stronger forearms that are going to contribute mightily when you go back to this exercise.
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The key here is not overlooking any of the muscles that participate in the overall performance of the move.
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Now this was an interesting one.
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When your hands are up on the bar, besides caring about how wide apart they are, you also should be caring about how you're gripping the bar.
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Because a lot of us will grip and pull straight down.
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What I want you to do is think differently.
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Think about how you can pull your hands closer together.
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Squeeze them together.
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Activate and feel the muscles of your chest engaging.
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Because the more activity you can get in your upper body for the pull-up, the better you're going to be at them.
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The more tight you can make your body, which is going to happen by squeezing your hands together, the better you're going to be at them.
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This is a theme that's going to come back here later in this video.
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But try this, take your hands and as you see here, try to direct the force inward.
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Don't just pull down.
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Push in as you're doing it.
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And I promise you, you're going to see a dramatic increase in how quickly you're able to pull yourself up to the bar.
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It's going to feel as if you're almost floating on air.
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And that's a big difference here because it happens just like that.
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Instead of pulling out, pull your hands in together and don't just pull straight down.
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In and down is going to be the key.
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All right, speaking of that total body tightness, how tight are you actually keeping yourself when you do the pull-up?
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I mean, are you rigid when you're doing the exercise?
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Or are your feet looking like this when you're in the move?
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Right, kind of crossing them up.
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Letting them dangle down below.
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All of this is no good.
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It's counterproductive to your ability to do pull-ups.
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And again, these are things you can fix just like this.
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And how do you fix them?
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You do this, you focus on these key points.
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When you're in this position here, everything changes.
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You plug what we call the energy leaks.
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And unless you've been watching my videos, you may not have been doing this.
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And if you have, congratulations because I guarantee you're already doing more pull-ups.
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But it's key, what you want to do here is get rid of that looseness.
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Because as you direct your force through that bar.
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You're actually going to lose that and disperse it out.
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That's the problem.
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We want to make sure that we're not, so we create rigidity there.
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So whatever force I direct down can go through the kinetic chain and back up and allow me to move my body very efficiently.
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So I point my feet downward by engaging my calves.
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I straighten out my knees by engaging my quads.
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I squeeze the glutes.
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I have my abs engaged much more than just passively hanging there.
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All of these things allow me to stay tight and as soon as I add tightness to the equation here, the body starts to fly up and down a lot easier.
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The process has become more efficient and my body moves in space with a lot more power and strength.
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If you do this right now, again, I promise you, you're going to do more pull-ups regardless of how many you're doing right now.
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The next thing you might be doing, maybe even inadvertently, is positioning your elbows in the wrong plane as it relates to your body this way.
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Do you have your elbows straight out to the sides because people tell you that you want to dig your elbows down into your sides to engage your lats?
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Or are you doing this instead?
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Getting your elbows out in front of your body.
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Hopefully, it's the latter.
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You got to put your elbows out in front of your body, it actually is biomechanically more favorable to your ability to do the exercise because you're placing the lats on more stretch.
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And at a time that we know if we can get the elbow out in front of the body, we're going to be in a position to create more stretch on the lats and have better recruitment when we need it the most at the bottom of the rep.
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Additionally, we know that this is something called the scapular plane and in the scapular plane our shoulders just move more naturally.
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Instead of fighting that and trying to place your arms back behind your body.
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Get them back in the plane that they prefer to be in, right here, angled slightly forward.
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And your shoulders will feel even better when you do the movement.
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So, get those elbows out in front, don't drive them out to the side unnaturally.
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And I promise not just more pull-ups, but more healthy pull-ups for the long run.
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The next one here is a common one, very common actually.
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And something we need to pay a lot of attention to because when you do this, you take away a lot of the strength you already have.
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Making this exercise more difficult.
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When you're at the top of the exercise, do you look like this?
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Are you sort of caved in?
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In other words, is your chest caved in with your upper back rounded and your elbows out in front?
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Yeah, your elbows are in a good position, like I just told you.
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But are you also allowing the rest of this to cave in?
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Because what you should be doing is not doing that.
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You should be allowing yourself to still maintain this natural thoracic extension with my elbows out in front of my body.
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Try this little test.
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If you were to go to a lap pull down and assume this same position that I had up on this pull-up bar.
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You're going to find it way more difficult to do the same repetitions with the same weight that you're used to using because you're making it very inefficient.
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You're taking away all that tightness, you're taking away the mechanical advantages you're providing your body by getting in thoracic extension.
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So you want to make sure that instead of doing it like this, you fix that.
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And you don't just fix it here on the lap pull down, you fix it back on the pull-up bar the same way.
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Get through the bar, allow yourselves to get your body angled backwards while maintaining your elbows out in front and this will allow you to pull at this angle to recruit more of the back muscles more favorably.
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And again, the strength is there, you're just taking away the strength because you're positioning your body in the wrong way.
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The next issue here is one that's actually fixed by adopting what I just told you in the last tip.
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And that is, we don't want to be caved in.
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Instead, we want to actually be attacking the bar with our chest.
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But I said our chest.
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Not like this, not our chin.
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How many times do you see people do this, they're literally doing this pull-up with the goal being just to make sure they get that chin right up to the bar.
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And if they get it, they got the rep.
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First of all, they're probably about six inches too short and they're just reaching with the length of their neck to get that chin up over the bar.
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That's not what we're talking about.
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That's not the goal.
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So the easy way to fix this is to one, attack the bar with your chest like I said.
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And number two, use your chest as the goal.
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That's the metric.
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Get through the bar.
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Get that chin above the bar.
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It's going to require more strength, but guess what, with the tips you've already added here, you're going to probably find it's much easier to get your body up there.
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So attack that bar and reach for the bar with your chest.
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That's going to place a better visual for you to actually strive for.
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That's going to make the overall repetition much easier to get to the full contraction that you're probably not getting to right now.
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This one's actually kind of always blown my mind when it comes to the pull-up.
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And that is, why do we always program this exercise differently than the other exercises?
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Let's say even in a single back workout.
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Why is it that we'll do a lap pull down and then drop the pin down a few place and do a drop set?
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Or we'll change the weight as we get fatigued, we'll actually lighten the weight a little bit and do more.
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Why do we just assume that we're going to do a certain number of pull-ups and when we fatigue, we're going to do less and when we fatigue, we're going to do less and when we can't do any more, we're done?
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You can actually adopt the same training principles like drop sets by just incorporating something like a band here.
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As soon as I reach failure, I could assimilate another drop set like I would on a regular exercise just by stepping into the band, getting back up onto the bar and doing more repetitions.
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This is going to improve my overall output over time, it's going to have me doing more repetitions over time, it's going to allow me to get better and stronger at the exercise over time.
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And overall improve my performance on this lift over time.
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But it requires that I not think about it like a different exercise.
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The same parameters that apply to everything else applies here and I want to make sure that you guys understand that and do it.
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And last but not least, when it comes to the programming of the pull-up, you have to also look at your prioritization of it.
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Why do we kind of always stick it at the end of the workout?
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It has the capacity to be one of the best lifts you possibly do, especially if you start to add weight as you get stronger.
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It could be one of your best back developers you have.
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So why do we always put it at the end?
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Switch it up, do something different.
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Place it as your priority, make it the first thing you do in your pull training or in your back day.
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Whatever it is you're doing for your training split right now.
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Warm up with the band, get yourself ready to do it.
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But then do it while you're fresh.
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You're going to see a remarkable difference in your ability to produce force on this exercise and to get more repetitions on this exercise.
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When you do it fresh versus when you relegate it to the very end.
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Get it towards the front of the line instead of always kicking it towards the back.
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And you'll see more gains from it as well.
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So there you have it, guys, more pull-ups are in your sight, just take note of these 10 things.
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These are all things that are easily fixed and fixed quickly.
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I'm not into the big long-term fixes that are going to require you having to reshape your entire way you train right now.
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These are things that any of us, no matter how many you're doing right now, can instantly change and even if you just do a couple of them.
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You're going to see more pull-ups in your next workout and more importantly, you're going to start to see more gains from the exercise.
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You're going to actually start to fall in love with it as much as I love this movement.
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Now, if you're looking for a program where we incorporate pull-ups, a lot of times, because we realize how important they are, you can find them all over at Athleanx.com.
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In the meantime, if you found the video helpful, leave your comments and thumbs up below.
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Let me know what else you want me to cover and I'll do my best to do that for you guys in the days and weeks ahead.
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If you haven't already done so, click subscribe and turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out.
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All right, guys, see you soon.
Topics:pull-upspull-up mistakesATHLEAN-XJeff Cavalierpull-up formlat activationbody tightnesselbow positioningstrength trainingexercise tips
