Quest for the muscle up: False Grip Pull-ups and Russian Dip

Well, I made this video to show some methods for developing the Russian dip and the false grip pull up.

I didn't go into much detail on the false grip pull up, because I didn't think about it at the time. I've talked about it other places here but to recap: Once you're doing the more advanced pull ups for sets of 5-10 reps pretty easily with 2 seconds up and 2 seconds down to deadhang each rep, you've got the strength to start working false grip pull ups. False grip is when your wrist is on top of the bar. If you watch my hands in the video you should be able to figure out how to do that. On the rings, your wrist will be at the bottom of the ring curve. If it's off to either side it will hurt. The goal is to have your nipples level with the bar at the top of the pull up, which should have your forearms nearly or completely parallel with the floor. You may not achieve this right away. If you get your shoulders over the bar at first keep doing that until it is easy for 2 sets of 5-10 reps, just to make sure you let your joints adapt. Then go up further. If you can only get to mid-chest, spend time there until you can do 2 sets of 5-10 reps with no strain, 2 seconds up and 2 seconds down. Keep going higher each time you feel no strain for a few weeks at the target sets and reps. You'll be doing great false grip pull ups before you know it!

Once you've got both the full russian dips and full false grip pull ups down pat, no strain, you'll be able to do a muscle up with no problem quite soon, but probably right out of the box. If not, slowly lower down through most of the transition and then push back up. Slow negatives with an emphasis on feeling the body position can help a lot, but for me all it took was powering right up.

o52cZ-_bH7s

Another excellent vid! IMO one of the great things here is the emphasis on slow progression and conditioning the joints to avoid injury! Too many of us have had lots of down time due to joint injury.

Hey Slizzardman

Thanks for another great video tutorial post!

I've been working on the russian dip since august 2009.Seeing you perform it, I think my understanding of the final movement is wrong.

In your video it looks as if you, in your bent arm support, have your elbows pointing straight down into the bar and down towards the floor. In this position your overarms are perpendicular to the bars.

I thought the bent arm support was supposed to entail your elbows pointing sideways away from your body, at almost the hight of your shoulders. In this position your overarms would be parallel to the floor.

The two positions are quite different, as they engage different muscles to bring you from the bent arm support to the dip starting point.

I'm fully capable of doing it your way, but I'm still only capable of doing it the "wrong way" 2 consecutive times in practice with alot of swinging motion (kipping help).

Is the way I've envisioned it a further progression of the russian dip? If not, does it have a name? I kinda like the thought of doing it the "wrong" way, so I would like to ask you if you have any comments on this movement, seeing as how you're a knowledgeable guy.

Viking

I think that a lot of the different arm positions depend heavily on how wide the parallel bars are compared to your body. Everything I have read suggests the width should be equal to the length from your fingertips to your elbow on one arm, plus two fingers. You CAN do these from a wider elbow angle, but you'll be smarter (from the perspective of reducing joint pressure) to first pull your elbows in towards your body so you don't have shearing forces in your elbow or shoulder! So if your elbows ARE wider, and that's certainly ok, I am pretty sure you want to pull them in before you start pushing up with lots of force. I would like to hear Coach's view on this, as I don't actually know what a coach would say, I'm just coming from my personal experience.

Even if you do a forearm/upper arm support, when you move forward the first thing you're going to want to do is pull your elbow into the same line of force as your wrist and shoulder. Does that make sense?

I got to ask: How many times have you hit that garage port opener with your head when using the bars?

Second: How tall are you and how much do you currently weight? You look big and heavy (hope I dont offend you there, just curious as I am a relatively small but compact guy)

It has defenitly more pressureon your inner part of elbow.

Maybe if you want to achieve wide aguilar's MU. And even then you should have very strong joints.

T2T: I'm 230 lbs. Not super light! I am in fact big and heavy hahaha!

I've seen measurements for PB vary.

The first I remember is elbow to first knuckle of fingers. I've also seen just to fist or to fingertips.

For me if I gone too narrow, it messes with my support swing at the expense of my upper arm swing. So I go wider. This is because my elbows round in so I need to go a bit wider to compensate for this.

http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=YVYLJYtoC4FGDtUluyKxqw%3D%3D Russian dip is about 1/2 way into the clip. Notice Gregor, goes to the upper arm support where as you do a different support, Lizzardman. You support on the inner side of the arm to the torso where the bicep and tricep. There are some awesome pressure points here and you can get awesome bruises when doing upper arm work if you're not used to it ( or flipping to it ).

Upper arm support, shrug up/down, then roll forward and push out of dip.

Russian Dips are performed by descending down until all of your weight is supported on the inside of the upper arms rather than on your hands. At this position, the elbows will be pointing directly out to the side. At no time should there be contact of either the forearms or the elbows on the bar. Please see BtGB pg 70 for additional details as well as demonstrative photos.

Otherwise the rest of the video was very good. The elbow supported variation shown above could be a helpful intermediate step toward the development of a full Russian Dip and I enjoyed the final transition dip variation on the end of the PBs.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Ok, then I pretty much had the right idea of how to do the movement. But this to me, is INCREDIBLY hard. As I mentioned previously, I've been working it since august 2009, and I could already then do a proper dip on the XR.

Is it just a particular weakness I have, or do other people here struggle with that transition? Lowering down onto my upper arms is

now realtively easy, but up again.... different story. I'm asking because this movement is listed as a relatively easy movement...

And doing it in an L-sit... wow.. I'll get there though. Hopefully (really optimistic) sometime this fall..

Gregor made it look like a walk in the park, but can't really compare myself to him.. :roll:

No, it's pretty hard.

If you go from a support to upper arm and back, you can employ a stretch-reflex to roll through the transition, but really it's difficult. This uses a kipping action of a lever back and forth.

I'm in the same boat as you where I can perform a dip on the rings with them turned out but the russian dip is very trying.

viking said:

But this (Russian Dip) to me, is INCREDIBLY hard. As I mentioned previously, I've been working it since august 2009, and I could already then do a proper dip on the XR.

Several suggestions come to mind:

1) Your XR dips may not have been as proficient as you thought. This is not uncommon.

2) Posting video of your Russian Dips, and perhaps your XR Dips as well, may help to pinpoint the problem.

3) Experiment with Slizzardman's transition dip variation on the end of the PBs where he controlled the degree of descent into and out of the Russian Dip.

Russian dips are a very productive exercise and well worth pursuing. Dependent upon your current strength levels, they may be used as either a maximal strength element or a supplemental movement. For example, I have recently begun assigning 5x10 sets of Russian Dips to my gymnasts as a finisher for one of their conditioning days; unweighted for the intermediates and weighted for the advanced athletes.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Thank you for your constructive comments coach!

I will definitley be doing Slizzardman's pb end movment!

Recording will be an issue, because I don't have any recording devices. But I think maybe I can muster something up for next Sunday.

Thank you all for this fruitful discussion!

Coach Sommer said:

Russian Dips are performed by descending down until all of your weight is supported on the inside of the upper arms rather than on your hands. At this position, the elbows will be pointing directly out to the side. At no time should there be contact of either the forearms or the elbows on the bar. Please see BtGB pg 70 for additional details as well as demonstrative photos.

Otherwise the rest of the video was very good. The elbow supported variation shown above could be a helpful intermediate step toward the development of a full Russian Dip and I enjoyed the final transition dip variation on the end of the PBs.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Thanks! I will update the video soon, or perhaps provide a link at the end to a new video that's JUST on the russian dip being done properly. I have one question. When coming up out of the proper russian dip, at what point do you start bringing your elbows closer to the body? Is that from the start or later on the movement, or do you leave them out there the whole time?

slizzardman said:

When coming up out of the proper russian dip, at what point do you start bringing your elbows closer to the body? Is that from the start or later on the movement, or do you leave them out there the whole time?

Rather than thinking of it as pulling the elbows into the body, I prefer to think of it as moving the elbows until they are pointing upward. The answer is, as soon as possible. You will not be able to apply pressure with your triceps until your elbows assume this position.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Got it! Thank you Coach! I did two sets of this today and I see exactly what you mean. I don't know if this will be the case for everyone else, but it was not a huge increase in difficulty from the elbow supported version I did, which was great to me! I was honestly a little afraid that I'd be unable to do them. The full Russian definitely develops the wrists more, that's for sure!

I did the slizzardman end of pb move today, and I wanna say thank you slizzardman!

I was so happy after doing this, because the ROM I was able to do was much bigger then what I had anticipated.

I basically could go all the way down and up again with out to much effort. 8) It's the strangest thing because as I've

said, doing the entire russian dip, I've felt like I wasn't even close to being able to do that transition from upper arm support to "dip bottom stance".

I saw slizzardman saying that the russian dip developed the wrists, and I didn't understand that at all. But now after doing the slizzardman move, I definitely know what he's talking about.

This got my hypothesizing that I just lacked understanding of how to do that transition and that this exercise gave me a much better feel of what the motion was all about and how to do it.

I'm really looking forward to my friday workout to see if my russian dip performance will improve with this new found understanding of the move.

Thank you Slizzardman!!!!!

You're welcome! I'm glad I could help.

I went to the gym yesterday with an added extra line on my workout card to try Slizzardman's false grip pullup on a bar. I don't know why but I just thought that there was no way I could get even one of them. I'm not a gymnastics rat so my wrists are still being carefully developed to withstand some of the workouts. I sorta surprised myself by doing 2x2 sets of to the nips false grip pullups at the end of my workout. I didn't experience some of the issues pointed out in the video regarding leaning back. Just seemed to pull from the hang up to the top and then back down.

Nice! Apparently not everyone has as much trouble with a deadhang false grip as I do. I DID find that by chalking my bar and my hands/wrists that I could go much, much lower.

The padded doorway pull up bars are also great for starting false grip bar pull ups. My son has one he clips into his closet and they seem to work well. I got the false grip initially on Coach's rings. For me, being able to move the rings from a more narrow grip and rotate a bit helped me starting out.

I also don't have parallel bars, only parallettes, so I do all my dips on the rings. For me, ring dips from the lowest possible position you can go seem helpful along with Bulgarians mixed in.

Slizzard,

As others noted, very impressive bodyweight strength for such a big guy.

I realise I'm probably playing the same tune I always do but if its the transition in muscle ups that always seems to be the weak spot then maybe isometric holds in that weak spot for SSC's would work well. Just time your max once at a certain angle in the russian dips, then just stick to sets of half your max at that angle for a couple of months. Try it again after a couple of months getting gradually closer to parallel with the bars.

Just my tupence worth.

Once the connective tissue is conditioned appropriately, that could work, but realistically that is just too much elbow stress for a heavy guy like me. Someone significantly lighter, who knows. I can't generalize that statement, but I am, at this point, against isometrics in a position with that much joint stress involved. You COULD do that once the russian dips and false grip pull ups are easily done with forearms close to parallel with the floor, but before that you're just asking to get hurt. Doesn't mean it will happen, but I don't think it's worth the risk.

hi,

actually my pull-ups ROM is less than slizzardman showed in video, so I was wondering what are possible ways to increase ROM

are normal pull ups progressions enough for this, or partial reps/singles/locks in end of ROM/(or any other suggestions ... :?: ) can be more effective for increasing ROM.