reckonerWeighted chin-up
When your bodyweight chin-up stops being hard, more reps is not the only answer. A belt puts the load back somewhere you can choose it, which is what lets a chin-up be trained the way a barbell lift is trained.
Palms toward you, shoulders down.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, biceps, upper back
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar, dip belt
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Load the belt on the floor
Thread the plates on with the chain hanging in front of you and check the buckle before you leave the ground. A plate working loose at the top of a rep is the failure that hurts, and it is entirely preventable down here.
Let the weight stop moving before you pull
Step up, take the bar with your palms towards you, and wait for the plates to hang still. Starting a set with them swinging means fighting a pendulum for every rep after it.
Pull the rep you pull unloaded
Elbows down to the ribs, chest towards the bar, neck long. Weight does not buy you a shorter rep, and a range that shrinks the moment you load it is the load telling you something.
Lower to a full hang, then step off
Elbows straight at the bottom, shoulder blades allowed to rise, then step down onto the box rather than dropping. Getting off a bar with a plate hanging from your waist is the part people rush.
What goes wrong
Adding weight before the bodyweight version is clean
If the last two reps of an unloaded set swing, the loaded set will swing from rep one. Fix the range and the tempo first, then reach for the belt.
Going up a whole plate at a time
You are adding to a lift whose working weight is your entire body, so the smallest plate on the rack is a smaller step than it feels and the next one up is a much larger one. Take the smallest increment your gym has and take it once.
Letting the legs start the rep
Hanging weight invites a little dip and drive from the knees, because it makes rep one easier. It also makes rep one a different exercise from rep six, and only one of them is being recorded.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 kg, 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | 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 at 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 12.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 12.5 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four 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
Belt or vest?
A belt hangs the load below your hips and a vest carries it against your chest, so they pull on you differently at the bottom of the hang. Both are in the library and Reckoner treats them as the same lane as the unloaded chin-up, so moving between them keeps one history.
When should I start adding weight?
When every prescribed set reaches the top of its rep range with a full hang at the bottom and no swing anywhere. Until that is true, the reps are the progression and the belt would only hide the gap.
Does loading it change what the movement trains?
No. It is the same pull with a heavier body. The underhand grip gives the biceps and the chest more of the work than an overhand pull-up does1, and hanging a plate from your waist does not move that.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. 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