Today marks the start of a new segment I’ll be doing on my site – covering exotic, unique and rare exercises that you’ve probably never tried before (or maybe you have?). While I love my bench, curls, deadlifts, squats etc. I tend to get bored if I don’t switch my shit up every now and then… and the injection of these exotic exercises into your routine will give it that extra fun factor. Oh and just because they are “exotic” doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to do… far from it.

The first one I’ll be covering is the Muscle Up, which I believe is one of the best upper body exercises you can do… if you can pull it off. Incorporated into a routine, muscle ups will chew you up and spit you out the other end. No fucking joke. You think you’re strong? Baha don’t make me laugh. You aint’ seen nuthin’ yet!

Exercise Name: Muscle Up
Prerequisites: Pullups (15), Dips (15), Jump pullup to cast on bar
Difficulty: Hard
Muscles Worked: Biceps, Tricpes, Lats, Shoulders, Chest

A muscle up is basically the evil combination of a pullup and a dip on a straight bar. Gymnasts do it all the time in their conditioning programs but even then, many of them have to break it down to complete a rep. What we want to get it is one continuous motion.

Assuming you have the prerequisites down, the best way to start it off is to do a normal pullup till you chin is touching the bar. Then lower yourself down at gravity’s pace and quickly “kip” your next pullup as fast as you can. This kipping motion will give you enough speed and height to get your chest is above the bar, then its just a matter of pushing yourself up. One complete, continuous rep. Nice.

The only problem is that it’s hard as fuck! Kipping on normal pullups is something I generally recommend against since we want a controlled rep which will recruit the maximum number of motor units… giving us awesome arms and a killer back. However, for a muscle up it’s practically required.

Now assuming that you didn’t run away after reading the prerequisites required for the muscle ups, I’m going to explain how you can work towards getting this down. Obviously, pullups and dips is something you’ll have to work on, but in the mean time, find a bar that is about a foot higher than you are. Then do a pullup while simultaneously jumping upwards and you will have enough force to get your chest over the bar, at which point you can come down. No need to complete the rep. This motion of getting your chest over the bar is the bottle neck in a muscle up… once you can get it up there, the push becomes easy as hell so make sure you master it.

And there you have it, one of the hardest exercises to pull off. Just to give you an idea of what a challenge this exercise is, the Guinness World Record for the most muscle ups done consecutively is only 26. For pullups? 62… held by Stanford Apseloff.

Cheers.

Note: I’ll be releasing a tutorial video on this as soon as I can since pictures won’t do this exercise much justice. In the mean time, I’ve thrown in the world record video below… try and spot out the phases of the exercise.

- FitJerk

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