Negative Muscle Up Questions

I figured I'd have learned the Muscle Up after what... a week? of dedicated training. 5 months later...

My problem was moving too fast through the progression, including neglecting the first stage of Negative Muscle ups. I have since returned to this movement and have some questions on its finer points.

My idea was to exactly reverse the movement I do in my regular MU (I was last training jumping muscle ups). My technique here was to drive through the center of my chest during the pull of phase keeping my hands close together, try to point my elbows up in the transition and then push up for the dip. So when I do the negative from the top I start to lower through the dip, bring my chest over the rings and hands close in together. I try to keep my hands close together through the transition, rings perpendicular to my body.

Is this correct? I have seen videos of people doing negatives and it seems like they don't worry about keeping the hands narrow on the chest. Should I have the rings parallel to my body during the transition?

Currently my negative transition happens very fast and I have a hard time controlling it so I can see that I have a lot of work to do in this yet.

Russian dips are another great one for developing the muscle-up transition. It is an intermediate exercise between the tiger push-ups and the actual muscle-up transition in terms of difficulty. You can also use a lat pull-down machine and work transitions with it using an adjusted weight.

Thanks for the replies folks. I am going to give the Russian Dips a shot day. I have been pretty surprised just at how difficult it has been to even perform negatives. I try descending down into my dip slowly and attempt a very controlled negative transition, but I just end up dropping, even with my legs elevated.

Check out the following video:

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The first couple are regular NMUs and the last couple are with my feet propped up.

If it is just a question of putting the work in then that is no problem as I train pretty regularly, but I don't feel like I'm challenging myself. I don't experience soreness after a few sets of NMUs and don't know if (sigh) they are too advanced for me. Zach, I tried them with the bands and that helped as well.

Do way more negatives, over time. Too fast from the transition to hang. Use bands or feet assist.

I cannot do a muscle up yet, but your problems look very familiar to me. This is how I'm trying to overcome them:

Since you're dropping through the transition, even with your feet in front of you on the floor, I suggest you put your feet directly underneath the rings and adjust the height of the rings so that the bottom of the rings is at the bottom of you rib cage. From that position start leaning backwards and slowly move through the transition while keeping your feet on the floor.

This should work.

I think it's important, when lowering through the transition, to try and pull your hands together. When lowering down in this way, halfway through the transition, your arms should look as if you're arm wrestling with the rings. That way you don't put too much strain on your elbows which may happen if you keep your arms parallel to your body. After lowering down, you can probably also do the positive part of the MU: pull yourself up (by using the arm wrestling technique) until you're over the transition. Make sure to use the false grip at all times.

When I first did these about two months ago, my arms felt painful, but now I can do them without any problems. When they start becoming too easy, simply put your feet a bit forward in front of the rings and go through the same procedure.

I already tried them one time with my feet supported on a 40cm high box, and I could do slowly controlled negatives but no positives. However, my arms felt too painful, so I'm going to do them with my feet still on the ground but a bit more forward.

The nice thing about this technique is that I can actually train the entire ROM of the MU and incrementally make it more difficult. You should be able to do it like this and still feel like you're training the required muscles, instead of just falling down or jumping through the transition and not feeling anything.

As I said, I cannot do a MU yet, but I'm hoping to get there with this technique.

Good luck!

you could try start off at the top and practicing the dip component and going as low as possible before you just drop, then push yourself up from there and eventually youll find yourself in the pull motion. slizzardman explains it better than me. in the video he explains it on a bar, but i think its still applicable on rings.

i had the same Problem.

Then i Stoped the NMU and did for 4 Weeks 3-4 times a week russiandips on the bars as slow as possible and

pullups in falsegrip as high as possible.

After 4 Weeks it was possible for me to do the transition slowly and the i needed 3 weeks more for my first MU

Thanks for the feedback guys- you've given me lots of things to think about/work on. I did see the Slizzardman video and am going to try some Russian Dips now. Those false grip pull-ups he does are amazing and I hope to be able to get there one day!

Was slizzardman a former marine?

seiyafan said:

Was slizzardman a former marine?

Never! Squids for life!

IcedDante said:

Thanks for the feedback guys- you've given me lots of things to think about/work on. I did see the Slizzardman video and am going to try some Russian Dips now. Those false grip pull-ups he does are amazing and I hope to be able to get there one day!

Haui's experience says it all. I went through the same thing a few years ago... You have to stop trying to do things you can't do and work on things you can do. False grip pull ups and Russian dips are what you can do, even if it's a very small range of motion to start with.

Never! Squids for life!

anhkun said:

you could try start off at the top and practicing the dip component and going as low as possible before you just drop, then push yourself up from there and eventually youll find yourself in the pull motion. slizzardman explains it better than me. in the video he explains it on a bar, but i think its still applicable on rings.

Actually I just realized we are talking about different videos. Slizzardman has a better one where he demonstrates false-grip pullups on the bar, and Russian dips on the parallel bars:

Russian dips are very much not available to me either, but he talks about using a very small ROM to begin so that's where I am at. I also did a few sets of Negative Muscle Ups with the band: The Good News: it felt very productive and I had a much easier time controlling the descent. The Bad News: It was a 50lb band so I've got quite a ways to go!

okay so you have the same problem I had a few months ago, now I can do a ring muscle-up no problem at all.

Follow this video trough in the same order, I say you do these every 3rd day, if your elbows, forearms or whatever hurts, then take a few extra days off. You will be doing a muscle up when you start to do real negatives but it is important to train negatives properly for 6-8 weeks. Your body will get used to the load.

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This one is really the key to muscle ups and you can track real progress with these, not just guessing if you went a little bit higher in your false grip pullups.

Good Luck with your training!

I recently started practicing negative muscle ups. 

And since last week I am able to do one slowly through the transition.

The feeling in my wrist is oke. That is no problem but just beneath the wrist the skin bruises and hurts a lot.

Is that normal? I try to keep the rings really close to my body, they tend to turn a bit so that my hand is a little more in front and the support is more on my forearm.

Am I doing something wrong?

If it is normal I will shut up and keep working.