Mark Ottobre breaks down chin-ups into two core moves: depress your lats and extend your thoracic spine, then drive your arms hard. The end position is elbows locked and head pulled through the bar, no swing. When you add weight, only the speed changes, form stays the same.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to unlock super strength on your chin-up. Who am I to make such claims? My name is Mark Ottobre. Best chin-up is at a body weight of 88 kilos with 62 kilos attached with perfect form. It's really two parts that allow me, done with speed, that allow me to get such a significant weight up to the bar, and that is the depression of my lats, the extension of my thoracic, and the rapid pull of my arms down into my underpants. So the first thing is we're going to depress. So tuck. See, and I want even more, right? Even more, right? And I'm going to get you to relax again. So I want you to really pull everything down. Pull everything down. Go, go ahead, pull everything down. Pull, pull, pull, pull. Now I'm going to do that one more time. Now as you do that, I want you to pull everything down and extend your spine. Extend that vertebra up into your sternum. So pull everything down. Pull, pull, pull, and extend and extend and extend really high. Okay, that's the first part of your chin-up. The end position is made up of two things. Your arm needs to be locked. If you do not lock your arm at the end of the chin-up, it is not the end of the rep. So your elbow needs to be locked. The other thing that needs to happen to make it the end position of the chin-up is you need to pull your head through.
No swing, no kipping. End position, pull. End position, pull. End position, pull.
So how does this translate to us adding load to the chin-up. In exercises, the only thing that should change between you doing it with a lightweight versus a heavyweight is the speed in which you do it at. So off you go. Okay, let's have a look at how you do this. All the way through and pull, and really get yourself up there. So all the way, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull right up. That's the end position. I just want to anchor that in for you, right? So get that in position. Good.
