reckonerChin-up
Palms towards you, hands about shoulder width, pull until your chin clears the bar. Most people manage more chin-ups than pull-ups, and the reason is not that it is a lesser movement. The underhand grip lets the biceps and the chest take a bigger share of the work1.
Palms toward you, shoulders down.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, biceps, upper back
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Hang from straight arms first
Palms towards you, hands about shoulder width, wrists straight rather than curled over the bar. Let the shoulders rise into your ears, then pull the blades down and back so you are hanging from your back and not from your joints.
Make the body one piece
Squeeze the glutes, brace the belly, cross or bend the legs. A chin-up is a moving plank. Anything that swings is work that never arrives at a muscle.
Drive the elbows towards your ribs
Lead with the elbows and let the bar come to you. Chest lifted, neck long. When the timing of the pull was measured, peak activity ran in an order: the lower trapezius and the chest start it, the biceps and the lats finish it1.
Lower to straight arms every time
Come down under control until the elbows are straight and the shoulder blades have risen again. Pooled comparisons of full and partial range training favor the full range on every outcome, slightly but consistently2.
What goes wrong
Letting a kip creep in around rep five
A small swing arrives and the reps after it are a different exercise done faster. If you have to swing, the set is over, and the honest number is the one before the swing.
Chasing the bar with your chin
Reaching with the neck adds nothing to the pull and teaches you to finish with the shoulders rolled forward. Chest towards the bar, and the chin arrives on its own.
Taking it as the shoulder-friendly pull-up
It is a different share of the work rather than a safer one. Measured side by side, the chin-up loads the biceps and the chest more and the lower trapezius less than the pull-up1, and the elbow and the wrist carry more of it, which is what the recorded restrictions are about.
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 | 4 x 6 | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 | 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 10 | One more set 2 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five sets next week. |
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
Chin-up or pull-up?
Both, if your shoulders are happy with both. Measured together, the lats worked hard in each. What moved was the share taken by the biceps and the chest, higher in the chin-up, and by the lower trapezius, higher in the pull-up1. Reckoner treats them as one lane, so alternating keeps your history in a single line.
I can only do two. What should I do?
Do those two properly, then finish the work on a loaded pull-down. A pull-down gives you the same overhead pull at a weight you choose, so you can train it in a rep range that builds something rather than grinding out singles.
How many sets of these should I be doing a week?
More weekly sets keep buying more size and more strength, with the returns getting smaller as the count climbs, and how many days you spread them over matters far less for size than the total3. Reckoner sets the number from your plan and what you logged, so you get an answer on the screen rather than a rule of thumb.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Four of the five have pages so far.
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 twenty-five participants measured across three bar pulls, latissimus dorsi running from 117 to 130 per cent of a maximal isometric contraction and biceps brachii from 78 to 96 per cent, with pectoralis major and biceps brachii significantly higher in the chin-up than the pull-up and lower trapezius significantly higher in the pull-up, and a consistent order of peak activity that began with lower trapezius and chest and finished with biceps and lats
- 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 reporting a trivial standardized mean difference of 0.12 in favor of full range training, with every outcome favoring full range but all effects between trivial and small, and a subgroup suggesting partials held at long muscle lengths may match or beat full range for size
- Pelland and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. The resistance training dose response: meta-regressions exploring the effects of weekly volume and frequency on muscle hypertrophy and strength gains sixty-seven studies and 2058 participants, with size and strength both rising as weekly set volume rises and both showing diminishing returns, and weekly frequency compatible with a negligible effect on size once volume is accounted for