The Most Common Pull-Up Mistakes You Need To Avoid

Pull-ups are a great way to increase the strength of your forearm and your upper body. Through this closed-chain up and down movement, you suspend your body by the hands and pull yourself up. You repeat this movement in batches of ten or more. Different muscles of your upper body, such as biceps brachii and latissimus dorsi, come into play. A lot of people would do any kind of pull-up without knowing the proper techniques of performing them. While it might look like you are performing a perfect pull-up, you are depriving yourself of the strength-building benefits. The following points will discuss the basic pull-up mistakes that you need to avoid.

Narrow Placement of Hands

If you narrow the gap between your arms when you hold the bar, there might be a shift of focus. This implies that you would not be targeting the muscles you aim to. The pull-up is an exercise that works on increasing your lat and mid-back strength. However, when your grip is narrow, brachioradialis, a forearm muscle becomes the primary mover there.

This way, it doesn’t remain a pull-up anymore. The whole workout turns into a curl. The only difference is that you are lifting your whole body weight here. If you expand the gap between your arms and place them just outside the breadth of your shoulders, you would be able to pull yourself up with little effort.

Skipping the Forearms Training

Of course, you wouldn’t want to over-work on the muscles in your forearm. But, they should be playing their part in increasing strength while you are doing a pull-up. One effective way to work on the radial forearm muscle is by performing the dumbbell reverse-grip hammer curls. It is important to pay attention to strengthening every muscle that plays a role during the pull-up. Every muscle in your lat, mid-back, and fore-arms is significant.

Wrong Grip Pressure

Many people tend to position their hands on the pull-up bar and try to pull them down. However, if you direct that force inward like you are attempting to get the hands closer while you are holding the pull-up bar, you may involve your chest in the activity.

The more you involve the upper section of your body during a pull-up, the tighter your body becomes. This can happen if you squeeze your hands simultaneously. You would become better at it with time.

Placing the Elbows

Position the elbows in the same frame as the upper half of your body is another common mistake that people make. What you need to do here is shift them in the forward direction slightly. When you project your elbow out in front of your torso, the posture gives you a biomechanical advantage, since you are placing more focus on the lat. This signifies that you can call your lat into action when you need it most, like at the end of the repetitions when you require more strength. The entire movement will eventually become more natural.

Curved Upper Body

In case you hunch your chest backward, you are pulling yourself up, you are making things more difficult for you unknowingly. You are using more strength than you need to perform a pull-up, and that extra strength is getting wasted.

What you need to do is maintain the natural extension of your thorax. One of the quickest and most effective ways to check your form is by taking the same position while performing a lat pull-down. You will be able to check how difficult it gets and thus can fix your position.

Not Involving the Chest

In case you are just pulling yourself up and touching the pull-up bar with your chin, you can’t count that as a pull-up. For a perfect pull-up, you have to involve your chest. For every rep, your chest must attack the bar. This doesn’t imply that you have to hit the bar with your torso. There is no hard and fast rule with that. The process will depend on the flexibility of your chest and the mobility of your shoulders.

Make sure that you are applying the perfect technique when you are performing pull-ups during home workouts. The quarantine period is a vital time when you can engage in bodybuilding and stay fit.