reckonerBand assisted chin-up
Palms toward you, a long band under one foot, chin over the bar. The band takes part of your weight and the underhand grip gives your biceps a bigger share of the pull1. Each step forward is a lighter band from your own list.
Palms toward you, lower slowly.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, biceps, upper back
- Kit
- Pull up bar, band
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight, with a band helping
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- A lighter band once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the band so it cannot slip
Check it for small nicks and tears first, and retire one that shows wear2. Pass it around the bar and back through itself, then pull it snug. Stand on a box and set the loop under the middle of one foot.
Take the grip
Palms toward you, hands about shoulder width, wrists straight. Ease down onto the band until your arms are straight, then pull your shoulder blades down.
Drive your elbows to your ribs
Keep your chest lifted and let the bar come to you. Stop when your chin clears it. Reaching with your neck adds nothing to the pull.
Lower slowly to straight arms
Come all the way down under control, then go again. Full range comes out ahead of partial range on most outcomes, by a small margin4.
What goes wrong
Riding the rebound
A band pulls according to how far it is stretched3, so the fast drop into the bottom gives you a push back out. Pause for a moment at straight arms and pull from a still hang.
Stopping short of straight arms
With a band under your foot the top half feels easy and the set feels productive. The bottom is the part you are here to train, so give it every rep.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 5 | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 6 | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 7 | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 8 | Next band Lighter bandEvery set reached the top of the range with good form, so you move to a lighter band. Less help, same reps. |
| 5 | 3 x 8 | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 8 | Holding steady Same bandThe lighter week was for recovery, not a test, so nothing logged in it counts against this exercise. It stays where it was before the lighter week. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Band assisted chin-up or pull-up?
Pick by what you want from the set. Compared side by side without bands, the chin-up drew more from the biceps and the chest, and the pull-up more from the lower trapezius1. Both are lifts in the same swap group, so you can move between them in a swap.
Do I use the same band for chin-ups and pull-ups?
They read the same list of long bands, and each lift keeps its own record. You may well be on a lighter band for one than for the other, and that is fine.
When does Reckoner move me to a lighter band?
When every working set was on one band, at the top of your rep range, and you rated the lift Clean or Fair. Then it suggests the next lighter band on your list, and you can always choose a different one. Rough never moves you on.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Youdas and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2010. Surface electromyographic activation patterns and elbow joint motion during a pull-up, chin-up, or Perfect-Pullup rotational exercise chest and biceps significantly more active in the chin-up than the pull-up, and lower trapezius significantly more active in the pull-up
- Rebecca Moore, Performance Health Academy, 2024. How to safely use elastic resistance in the clinic and at home clinical guidance to check a band before each use for small nicks and tears and to discard one that shows wear; the page carries no date of its own and 2024 is its site copyright
- Patterson and colleagues, Physical Therapy, 2001. Material properties of Thera-Band tubing force in elastic tubing changing with elongation, nonlinear in the first stretch and linear after 50 per cent elongation; an older paper kept because it measures a material property
- Wolf and colleagues, International Journal of Strength and Conditioning, 2023. Partial vs full range of motion resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis a meta-analysis finding trivial to small differences that favor full range on most outcomes
- Thomas, Muller and Busse, Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 2005. Quantification of tension in Thera-Band and Cando tubing at different strains and starting lengths the statement that precise quantification using color coded bands is not possible; an older paper kept because it measures a material property
- Uchida and colleagues, Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 2016. Thera-Band elastic band tension: reference values for physical activity eight colors measured across ten elongations, with five colors differing from the maker's figures and those figures described as overestimates