Reducing Forward Lean @ Ring Muscle-Ups

Recently I bought some rings for home use, and so decided to focus on ring muscle-up progressions in BtGB. I'm currently at the stage of doing the rings close to body progression for 3 sets of 3, while being slow and trying to stay upright through the transition. I can do wide ones as well, but I'm taking it slowly.

A few days ago I decided to try a slow/controlled bar muscle-up, as it is one of the progressions in BtGB after wide. I was surprised, as I managed to do it without touching the bar!

Skip to 17 seconds in the video for a better view and repetition. First one didn't start from dead hang and didn't control the negative properly.

Whilst not touching the bar on the way up and on the way down felt awesome, my forward lean is still quite a lot. How does one progress to zero lean? I know it will take a long time, but is it simply a matter of trying to reduce the lean each time I do them, or are there other progressions to be done?

The book says that a bar muscle-up will mean that you can't lean forward, which is preferable, as that's how a perfect ring muscle-up is done. But wasn't I leaning forward here? So, the bar still allows you to lean forward, even when not touching it?

There will always be forward leaning to some extent for bar muscle-ups since your body is displaced behind the bar. Furthermore, narrow grip muscle-ups on rings will also have forward leaning to some extent unless you you start the press during the middle of the transition which would require immense triceps strength. If you want a muscle-up without any forward lean then you must do a wide arm muscle-up on rings like Aguilar Andreas (search YouTube). You should always try to lessen the lean as much as possible in each of your muscle-up reps to be able to lessen them over time and also work on wide grip muscle-ups which can carryover some of the transition strength for the narrow grip one.

B1214N said:

There will always be forward leaning to some extent for bar muscle-ups since your body is displaced behind the bar. Furthermore, narrow grip muscle-ups on rings will also have forward leaning to some extent unless you you start the press during the middle of the transition which would require immense triceps strength. If you want a muscle-up without any forward lean then you must do a wide arm muscle-up on rings like Aguilar Andreas (search YouTube). You should always try to lessen the lean as much as possible in each of your muscle-up reps to be able to lessen them over time and also work on wide grip muscle-ups which can carryover some of the transition strength for the narrow grip one.

Ahh, I understand. Once I get 3x5 super slow narrow ring muscle-ups, I will move onto wide, as wide as my stairway will allow at least (I hang the rings from a pull-up bar). Or I will find a tree branch!

Regarding what you said about narrow no lean requiring crazy tricep strength, that makes sense. Because recently when trying to reduce lean as much as possible, I found myself going through the transition with the rings moving away from the body (into a wider grip).

I saw that Andreas Aguilar muscle-up on YouTube a while ago. Hopefully one day be able to do that!

My best ring muscle-ups (on video) are probably these, although I think they've improved since then. At that time I was new to rings, so wasn't very proficient at the support hold. Much better now though. I think I'll move onto wide in the next few weeks, all being well?

Yes start doing wider MUs when you feel that you're ready and when narrow grip MUs are easy for you.