**NEVER DO PULL-UPS LIKE THIS! | 10 Most Common Mistakes — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/never-do-pull-ups-like-this-10-most-common-mistakes-transcript/ 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. Answers ## Questions about this video How can one strengthen the brachialis and forearms to improve pull-up performance? To strengthen the brachialis and forearms, the video suggests incorporating exercises like reverse hammer curls into your routine. By doing a few sets a week, you can build stronger brachialis and forearms that will contribute significantly to your pull-up performance, even though they shouldn't be the primary drivers of the movement. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker None What's up guys, Jeff Cavalier, Athleanx.com. 00:05 Speaker None 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. 00:16 Speaker None 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. 00:29 Speaker None 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. 00:35 Speaker None So, let's get right into the first one here. 00:37 Speaker None Your hand placement. 00:38 Speaker None All right, so the first thing you want to make sure you're not messing up is your grip. 00:43 Speaker None And I'm talking about the width. 00:45 Speaker None Don't go too wide and don't go too narrow. 00:48 Speaker None Narrow is where most people screw this up. 00:50 Speaker None You want to be right here at about shoulder width apart. 00:52 Speaker None 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. 01:06 Speaker None Which are ill-equipped to handle your body weight repetition after repetition in a pull-up. 01:14 Speaker None When I get my arms in front of my body, I'm essentially creating some version of a reverse barbell curl. 01:20 Speaker None Except this time, instead of curling a barbell up, I'm curling my body up to a bar. 01:24 Speaker None It doesn't matter, the muscles recruited are the same. 01:30 Speaker None 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. 01:38 Speaker None And recruit the muscles best equipped to do this job. 01:43 Speaker None Now that being said, the brachialis is a muscle that is going to participate in the pull-up. 01:50 Speaker None We just don't want it to be the primary focus of the pull-up. 01:53 Speaker None So what I want you to do is stop ignoring the value of this muscle when it comes to performing the overall move. 01:58 Speaker None Right, it still needs to be strong. 02:00 Speaker None We just don't want it to be the driver of the movement. 02:03 Speaker None So, are you doing enough to strengthen this muscle? 02:06 Speaker None Are you doing enough of these? 02:08 Speaker None Reverse hammer curls. 02:10 Speaker None Really kind of in this pronated position to really recruit those muscles. 02:13 Speaker None Are you doing enough of these to get a stronger forearm? 02:17 Speaker None 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. 02:25 Speaker None The key here is not overlooking any of the muscles that participate in the overall performance of the move. 02:31 Speaker None Now this was an interesting one. 02:33 Speaker None 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. 02:40 Speaker None Because a lot of us will grip and pull straight down. 02:43 Speaker None What I want you to do is think differently. 02:45 Speaker None Think about how you can pull your hands closer together. 02:50 Speaker None Squeeze them together. 02:51 Speaker None Activate and feel the muscles of your chest engaging. 02:56 Speaker None Because the more activity you can get in your upper body for the pull-up, the better you're going to be at them. 03:00 Speaker None 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. 03:05 Speaker None This is a theme that's going to come back here later in this video. 03:08 Speaker None But try this, take your hands and as you see here, try to direct the force inward. 03:13 Speaker None Don't just pull down. 03:15 Speaker None Push in as you're doing it. 03:18 Speaker None 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. 03:23 Speaker None It's going to feel as if you're almost floating on air. 03:26 Speaker None And that's a big difference here because it happens just like that. 03:30 Speaker None Instead of pulling out, pull your hands in together and don't just pull straight down. 03:35 Speaker None In and down is going to be the key. 03:38 Speaker None All right, speaking of that total body tightness, how tight are you actually keeping yourself when you do the pull-up? 03:42 Speaker None I mean, are you rigid when you're doing the exercise? 03:45 Speaker None Or are your feet looking like this when you're in the move? 03:50 Speaker None Right, kind of crossing them up. 03:53 Speaker None Letting them dangle down below. 03:55 Speaker None All of this is no good. 03:58 Speaker None It's counterproductive to your ability to do pull-ups. 04:02 Speaker None And again, these are things you can fix just like this. 04:05 Speaker None And how do you fix them? 04:07 Speaker None You do this, you focus on these key points. 04:09 Speaker None When you're in this position here, everything changes. 04:13 Speaker None You plug what we call the energy leaks. 04:16 Speaker None And unless you've been watching my videos, you may not have been doing this. 04:20 Speaker None And if you have, congratulations because I guarantee you're already doing more pull-ups. 04:23 Speaker None But it's key, what you want to do here is get rid of that looseness. 04:28 Speaker None Because as you direct your force through that bar. 04:31 Speaker None You're actually going to lose that and disperse it out. 04:35 Speaker None That's the problem. 04:36 Speaker None We want to make sure that we're not, so we create rigidity there. 04:39 Speaker None So whatever force I direct down can go through the kinetic chain and back up and allow me to move my body very efficiently. 04:45 Speaker None So I point my feet downward by engaging my calves. 04:49 Speaker None I straighten out my knees by engaging my quads. 04:52 Speaker None I squeeze the glutes. 04:54 Speaker None I have my abs engaged much more than just passively hanging there. 04:58 Speaker None 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. 05:04 Speaker None The process has become more efficient and my body moves in space with a lot more power and strength. 05:10 Speaker None 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. 05:14 Speaker None 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. 05:20 Speaker None 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? 05:28 Speaker None Or are you doing this instead? 05:30 Speaker None Getting your elbows out in front of your body. 05:32 Speaker None Hopefully, it's the latter. 05:33 Speaker None 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. 05:40 Speaker None 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. 05:47 Speaker None Additionally, we know that this is something called the scapular plane and in the scapular plane our shoulders just move more naturally. 05:53 Speaker None Instead of fighting that and trying to place your arms back behind your body. 05:59 Speaker None Get them back in the plane that they prefer to be in, right here, angled slightly forward. 06:05 Speaker None And your shoulders will feel even better when you do the movement. 06:08 Speaker None So, get those elbows out in front, don't drive them out to the side unnaturally. 06:12 Speaker None And I promise not just more pull-ups, but more healthy pull-ups for the long run. 06:16 Speaker None The next one here is a common one, very common actually. 06:20 Speaker None 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. 06:25 Speaker None Making this exercise more difficult. 06:27 Speaker None When you're at the top of the exercise, do you look like this? 06:30 Speaker None Are you sort of caved in? 06:32 Speaker None In other words, is your chest caved in with your upper back rounded and your elbows out in front? 06:40 Speaker None Yeah, your elbows are in a good position, like I just told you. 06:43 Speaker None But are you also allowing the rest of this to cave in? 06:46 Speaker None Because what you should be doing is not doing that. 06:48 Speaker None You should be allowing yourself to still maintain this natural thoracic extension with my elbows out in front of my body. 06:53 Speaker None Try this little test. 06:55 Speaker None If you were to go to a lap pull down and assume this same position that I had up on this pull-up bar. 07:00 Speaker None 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. 07:08 Speaker None You're taking away all that tightness, you're taking away the mechanical advantages you're providing your body by getting in thoracic extension. 07:13 Speaker None So you want to make sure that instead of doing it like this, you fix that. 07:19 Speaker None 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. 07:23 Speaker None 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. 07:33 Speaker None And again, the strength is there, you're just taking away the strength because you're positioning your body in the wrong way. 07:39 Speaker None The next issue here is one that's actually fixed by adopting what I just told you in the last tip. 07:43 Speaker None And that is, we don't want to be caved in. 07:46 Speaker None Instead, we want to actually be attacking the bar with our chest. 07:50 Speaker None But I said our chest. 07:51 Speaker None Not like this, not our chin. 07:52 Speaker None 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. 07:59 Speaker None And if they get it, they got the rep. 08:01 Speaker None 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. 08:07 Speaker None That's not what we're talking about. 08:09 Speaker None That's not the goal. 08:10 Speaker None So the easy way to fix this is to one, attack the bar with your chest like I said. 08:15 Speaker None And number two, use your chest as the goal. 08:18 Speaker None That's the metric. 08:19 Speaker None Get through the bar. 08:21 Speaker None Get that chin above the bar. 08:22 Speaker None 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. 08:29 Speaker None So attack that bar and reach for the bar with your chest. 08:34 Speaker None That's going to place a better visual for you to actually strive for. 08:39 Speaker None 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. 08:44 Speaker None This one's actually kind of always blown my mind when it comes to the pull-up. 08:50 Speaker None And that is, why do we always program this exercise differently than the other exercises? 08:55 Speaker None Let's say even in a single back workout. 08:57 Speaker None 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? 09:04 Speaker None Or we'll change the weight as we get fatigued, we'll actually lighten the weight a little bit and do more. 09:10 Speaker None 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? 09:17 Speaker None You can actually adopt the same training principles like drop sets by just incorporating something like a band here. 09:22 Speaker None 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. 09:31 Speaker None 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. 09:40 Speaker None And overall improve my performance on this lift over time. 09:43 Speaker None But it requires that I not think about it like a different exercise. 09:46 Speaker None The same parameters that apply to everything else applies here and I want to make sure that you guys understand that and do it. 09:52 Speaker None 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. 09:58 Speaker None Why do we kind of always stick it at the end of the workout? 10:01 Speaker None 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. 10:08 Speaker None It could be one of your best back developers you have. 10:12 Speaker None So why do we always put it at the end? 10:14 Speaker None Switch it up, do something different. 10:16 Speaker None Place it as your priority, make it the first thing you do in your pull training or in your back day. 10:20 Speaker None Whatever it is you're doing for your training split right now. 10:23 Speaker None Warm up with the band, get yourself ready to do it. 10:26 Speaker None But then do it while you're fresh. 10:29 Speaker None 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. 10:36 Speaker None When you do it fresh versus when you relegate it to the very end. 10:40 Speaker None Get it towards the front of the line instead of always kicking it towards the back. 10:43 Speaker None And you'll see more gains from it as well. 10:45 Speaker None So there you have it, guys, more pull-ups are in your sight, just take note of these 10 things. 10:50 Speaker None These are all things that are easily fixed and fixed quickly. 10:56 Speaker None 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. 11:01 Speaker None 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. 11:09 Speaker None 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. 11:15 Speaker None You're going to actually start to fall in love with it as much as I love this movement. 11:18 Speaker None 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. 11:27 Speaker None In the meantime, if you found the video helpful, leave your comments and thumbs up below. 11:32 Speaker None 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. 11:35 Speaker None 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. 11:40 Speaker None All right, guys, see you soon. Topics: pull-ups pull-up mistakes ATHLEAN-X Jeff Cavalier pull-up form lat activation body tightness elbow positioning strength training exercise tips Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/ai-flashcard-generator/?from=transcript&id=5367) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=5367) Free, made by AI from this transcript. No signup. --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/never-do-pull-ups-like-this-10-most-common-mistakes-transcript/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/