Linking Kipping Bar Muscle-Ups

Linking Kipping Bar Muscle-Ups can be challenging even for athletes that can complete multiple single repetitions. In the following video, gymnastics expert, Pamela Gagnon shares tips to dial in your form to crank out larger sets of muscle-ups!

Linking Kipping Bar Muscle-Ups Transcript

Pamela Gagnon here from Performance Plus Programming, and today we’re going to tackle how to link the kipping bar muscle-up. The number one fault I see in people linking the bar muscle-up are those wanting to link it but not ready to link it. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a solid single kipping bar muscle-up. So, you want to make sure you land tall in order to create tension to wrap out the next step. If you are landing really lazy and kind of like that, then we know we really need to improve your first bar muscle-up, and we have an amazing program at Performance Plus program for that, link will be below on the YouTube comments.

How Do We Link Bar Muscle-Up Reps?

So, after our first attempt bar muscle-up, what we want to do is keep our torso upright, control our descent, coming into a small pike. And then waiting for the tension to build, once we get into this big arch, we’ll feel that tension build and then we’ll feel ourselves ready to be snapped back into the pull around position.

Now, dropping into that position can be very difficult, so I want you to grab a box, we’re going to set it up right in front of the rig. And we’re going to learn to drop, keeping our torso upright like we’re sitting in a chair, pike, and then pulling down in order to create that tension in the back of our traps and back in order to control the arch. So, that would be drill number one, working on just the fall into the descent.

Drill 2

So, step number two would be taking that drill and working on learning to control just the arch into a small pullback, which would look like this. So, now we are in the top of the first position and we’re going to go torso upright, sitting in the chair, holding tension, and then just waiting for that tension to build and then getting into that second position of the bar muscle-up, which is the pull around stage. Basically, we’re going to break this up, so we can train our brain to go through each step and not rush to the top. That’s a huge fault is people get really anxious and they want to rush into the position. So after that, we can work on getting a little bit higher into the pull around position.

So we’re here, we’re going to fall into the chair, slow ourselves down just slightly, and now I can see above the rig. So, we’re going to slowly build into the next bar muscle-up stage, and I want you to do a good 10 to 20 reps of each position, starting with that box in order to build the muscle memory.