Chris Sinagoga | Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 10:42AM I had this video posted a few weeks ago but forgot to publish it. This is from that workout we did with Strict Pull-ups, dumbbell cleans, and GHD sit-ups. The original rep scheme was 21-15-9, but we did 3-minute, 2-minute, and 1-minute rounds of each. The gym was crowded at 6:30 - both with a big session and soccer kids on the turf - and our crew managed to have a really good workout. Here's how they looked.
We've been doing Ricky Reps for pull-ups since the start of the year and so far I really like what I've been seeing. We've had three people (at least) get a strict pull-up, a bunch of prs on Cindy, and lots of improvements on pull-up height. It's difficult to retest, and not everything is about being able to retest, so that's okay; we'll use the benchmark workouts for that.
Moving forward I need to do a better job of looking at the fringe people; these are the Mr. Careys and Shakeses and Steins of our gym who aren't quite strong enough to do strict pull-ups in workouts, but aren't at the early Ricky Reps stage of just hanging onto the bar. Being able to control the kip to only use as much momentum as you need to get to the bar, and nothing more, will help get more out of the pull-up in my opinion. It's the progression after the flexed bar hang, after the kipping pull-up, and before the strict pull-up. The "strict kip"pull-up. Jay and Carter were doing strict ones in the video above, though I would have liked to see them tighten up a bit.
As Jacob says during the Michigan games, "water always finds its level." Since the new year crossfit.com has been doing more strict pull-ups than I've seen in as long as I've been following the site. This is because holes in the fitness armour have been exposed in the collective community. As it turns out, we fall into this category as well (thus all the pr's and graduations). We won't forget about kipping altogether, but we need to bring this area of our fitness up so others can see an increase.
