Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [173]
Be sure to lower yourself under control to get the most out of the negative, and always use only as much jump as necessary. Or you can use resistance bands in the rack until you are strong enough to do the movement with only a jump. The ability to do an honest chin-up may be beyond some novices at a heavier bodyweight, and if you cannot do a good strict rep at all, it will be best to wait until your lats and arms are stronger from deadlifts and presses or until your bodyfat comes down enough to permit you to handle your bodyweight effectively on the bar.
Figure 7-39. Chin-ups assisted by the use of resistance bands in your handy-dandy power rack.
Kipping chin-ups and pull-ups are gymnastic derivatives of the jumping version. The kipping version uses the momentum of a slight swing preceding the pull, when the swing is converted into an upward roll of the hips, translating the swing energy into upward movement. The kip distributes the movement over more muscle mass, using the abs, hip flexors, and lower back in addition to the lats and arms, so that more muscle mass is used in the exercise and more reps can be done. Strict chins and pull-ups concentrate the effort on less muscle mass and work it harder.
Figure 7-40.The kipping pull-up.
Kipping chin-ups and pull-ups have proven themselves to be useless as a way to strengthen the strict versions of the movement, and in the absence of enough strength to do the strict versions, they have proven to be dangerous for shoulder health. Resist the temptation to jump on any bandwagon that encourages short-term gratification at the expense of long-term progress. Many people who can do 15 kipping reps cannot do 2 dead-hangs, and have made no progress on their dead-hangs since they started cheating the movement with the kip. If you want to use kipping pull-ups or chin-ups in a conditioning workout, make sure your shoulders and arms are strong enough to do 8–10 strict reps first so that you don’t hurt yourself chasing a meaningless number. If you cut this important corner, shoulder surgery may be the only reward you receive.
Weighted chins and pull-ups are an excellent source of heavy non-pressing work for the upper body. Plates are suspended from a chain on a belt, or a dumbbell can be held in the feet if not much weight is used. A good rule of thumb is that when you can do 12–15 bodyweight reps, it is probably time to start doing some of the work weighted, possibly alternating higher-rep bodyweight workouts with lower-rep weighted workouts. Several sets across are appropriate for chins and pull-ups, either weighted, unweighted, or assisted. And many people have made steady linear progress by microloading their chins the same way they program the bench press and press, adding 1.5–2 pounds to three sets of five reps every workout. Try them all and see what works best for you.
Dips
The parallel-bar dip is a movement borrowed from gymnastics. It consists of supporting yourself by the arms, between and above two parallel bars, lowering your body down, and then driving it back up. The dip is a good substitute for the bench press if it cannot be done for some reason, and is far superior to the decline bench press, which there is no good reason to do. If the “lower pecs” and triceps are the object of your desire – the apple of your eye, as it were – then dips are your exercise. They are better than the decline because, like any good exercise, they involve the movement of lots of your muscles, besides the lower pecs and triceps. In this case, dips involve the movement of your entire body; they are like pushups in this respect. They are better than pushups because they can be weighted – and thus incrementally increased in load – and performed alone, whereas pushups cannot be weighted conveniently even with two people involved.
The quality of an exercise increases with the involvement of more muscles, more joints, and more central nervous system activity needed to control them. The more of the body involved in an exercise, the