A few disclaimers right out of the gate…
- There are a million ways to teach and to train pull-ups. What we do is, after nearly 11 years and hundreds of clients, what we’ve found works best for the greatest number of people. That’s not to say that other ways are wrong or that they don’t work.
- We do actually use bands occasionally, but in very specific circumstances. And, it’s important to acknowledge, that stuff with bands can be super fun.
- This post gets into the nitty-gritty of pull-up progressions and training. Skip it if that’s not interesting to you!
- We are are all unique snowflakes and what works for one person might not be what works for another.
Ok, moving on.
If you’re still with me, I’m going to assume you know what a pull-up is. In the CrossFit (and functional fitness) world, there is great debate about whether you should learn to execute a strict pull-up before you learn kipping pull-ups, or if it’s ok to do kipping pull-ups first as you build the strength for strict pull-ups.
We’ve shifted our thinking on this over the years.
A helpful, guiding question for us has been: “What is the purpose of a pull-up?”
Ten years ago, I would have told you that the purpose of a pull-up is to get your chin over the bar. In which case, any kip, swing, kick, jump, or band accomplishes the goal. But if you ask me that question today, I have a different answer. The purpose of a pull-up is not to get your chin over the bar.
The purpose of a pull-up is to make you strong.
And pull-ups make you crazy strong. They target and develop your lats, rhomboids, traps, biceps, deltoids, even your triceps, pecs, and abs. They’re incredible. I can’t imagine them ever not being a part of my strength training.
Which probably reveals that we are now firmly on the side of the debate where we think you should develop the strict pull-up before you start to kip them.
So what’s the purpose, then, of a kipping pull-up?
A kipping pull-up is how you take an amazing strength movement and turn it into a conditioning movement. By adding speed to the movement, you increase the power output and intensity, which improves things like cellular fueling of the muscles, connective tissue strength, and cardiovascular endurance. This is like doing 50 air squats for time instead of a heavy set of 3 back squats. It absolutely has its place. (Incidentally, we find jumping pull-ups and jumping chest-to-bar pull-ups to be an excellent way to accomplish this same goal if an athlete doesn’t have strict, and therefore, kipping pull-ups yet).
But, in my humble opinion, that place is after you’ve developed the strength and technique (i.e. understanding of muscle engagement) to do strict pull-ups. If you have strict pull-ups, kipping pull-ups are not hard from a strength perspective. They’re hard from a muscle burn and breathing perspective, and since they’re a conditioning movement, that’s exactly right.
And that brings me at last to the discussion of banded pull-ups, and specifically, banded kipping pull-ups.
The way bands are often used in pull-up work is as a progression. The theoretical progression, which we’ll call Progression A, goes: no pull-ups -> learn to kip with a band -> banded kipping pull-ups -> kipping pull-ups -> strict pull-ups -> super strong upper body.
Using bands for kipping movements can absolutely make you better at the kipping movement. The problem with this progression however, which is one we used in our first few years coaching, is that we seldom saw it yield strict pull-ups or the ensuing upper body strength people were looking for. Progression A yields kipping pull-ups. We had a lot of people who could do kipping pull-ups when we did that progression. But when we started putting in a strict pull-up prerequisite, we had very, very few people who could do the strict movement. So we don’t use bands for kipping pull-ups because we don’t feel like they help get to the end goal of getting as strong as possible with pulling movements.
Progression B, which we use now, goes: no pull-ups -> dead hang practice -> scap pull-ups -> standing pull-ups -> chin-over-bar hold -> negative chin-ups -> negative pull-ups -> strict chin-ups -> strict pull-ups -> super strong upper body -> kipping pull-ups.
Progression B has a lot more steps. But, in our experience, it’s actually faster. And once someone has strict pull-ups, we can usually get them kipping pull-ups in a single 15-30 minute skill session.
Now, this has been a meandering conversation that might be totally uninteresting to you, but the takeaway (I hope) is this:
Exercises are made up. The intention behind them is usually not to get better at the movement. It’s to make you stronger, or faster, or more powerful, or healthier. Our advice always, especially when it comes to movement progressions, is to do the variation of the movement that serves the ultimate goal.
If your ultimate goal is to be able to execute a kipping pull-up, then please, for real, go live your best life with all the bands you want.
But if your ultimate goal is to get strong with upper body pulling, or is even movement-specific with higher level things like muscle-ups or butterfly pull-ups, do yourself a favor and work toward those strict pulling variations first. I know it can be a long and frustrating road. But it will be well worth the effort.