Program recap
After you understand how to perform the exercise correctly, you should now have mastered how to maximise the potential of every repetition. We achieve this through being ‘inefficient’ That is, we want to do the most amount possible every single rep. You should try and apply these three principles to every strength exercise you perform.
Irradiation: trying to activate all of our muscles prior to the exercise beginning. We squeeze the bar as hard as we can before and during the rep.
Acceleration: we try and perform the upward part of the lift explosively (fast concentric contraction). Revert back to our quick physics lesson; force = mass x acceleration, by increasing the acceleration, we increase force production.
Valsalva: we reinforce whole body tension by holding our breath. The pneumomuscular reflex is theoretical, but there is a good chance you should feel stronger.
Chin-up test
Testing is an important part of programming used to monitor progress objectively. Because we don’t max out in every exercise, and when we do perform exercises using an AMRAP protocol, we may carry some pre-fatigue from exercises performed earlier in the workout that use the same muscle groups.
We want to perform tests without any fatigue, to give us an accurate indicator of our top-level performance. While we do want to perform the absolute maximum number of repetitions, it is on condition that technique is performed strictly. Go to dead hang between reps and make sure your chin goes over the bar, otherwise it doesn’t count!
Start position
End position
Fails.
| Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced | Badass | |
| # of chins | <5 | 6-15 | 15-25 | 25+ |
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