Best Pullup Leg Position (GET MORE REPS!)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. So today we’re going to answer the question of whether or not the position of your legs during a pullup, or chin-up matters to your performance in the exercise. I’m going to give you the quick answer here.

That’s ‘yes’. As a matter of fact, probably in a way that’s going to shock you because you’re probably doing it the way that most people do it. The second thing though is – it has nothing to do with changing, necessarily, the weight that you’re lifting because your bodyweight is not going to change, the force of gravity is not going to change. so in a given day, in a given set, in a given rep the way you’re lifting is going to stay consistent no matter what position you keep your legs in. However, the impact that has on the muscles that you’re trying to train – in this case, the lats – is going to be dramatically affected by the position of your legs.

Let me show you what that means and how that all comes together. We’re going to break out Raymond and we know that Raymond one day had a lat. No more. However, we do know that the attachments of the lat start here in the back of the arm and they come all the way down here to the pelvis. They literally attach to the top of the pelvis.

So we know – oh my God. Raymond’s gone. All right. So he’s out. We know that the pelvis can change position depending upon what we do with our legs and we know that the lat, again, comes all the way down into the pelvis.

So we can change the stretch on a muscle depending upon the position of our legs. So if you look at the bar here the common position that we see is feet crossed, knees bent, legs behind you. Now, this is a popular position. A lot of times out of necessity. It’s great because when you’re training at home on a pullup bar in a doorway you don’t really have a lot of vertical room to do the pullup.

You need to keep your legs crossed, and you need to bend them to shorten that distance. However, you don’t have to do them with your knees behind you. You can do them also, as an alternative, with your knees in front of you. Now, what does that do? It dramatically changes what’s going on with the lat and the force that you can generate because we know that pre-stretching a muscle allows for a stronger contraction of that muscle during exercise.

When we look at the classic version here with the feet behind us we’re actually in a contracted position of the lats. By getting into a little bit of an anterior tilt, getting us into lower back extension here, we’ve brought that pelvis closer to the attachment in the arm and it’s shortened that distance. So we don’t have that pre-stretch capability like we do if we do the opposite and bring our knees in front of our body. If you have never felt this, try it yourself. Get up on the bar and do what I’m showing you here.

Bend your knees, put them back behind your body, you cross your feet, and now feel the position of the lats and what it feels like in that spot, and then now allow your legs to travel forward. Immediately you should feel an increased stretch by doing nothing more than rotating the pelvis from an anterior, to a posterior position. So we could do it out of this position, but there’s a downside to that, too. The downside is this now requires a lot more ab strength. The abs can be a weak spot for a lot of us, especially those that are struggling to do pullups.

So that’s not necessarily the best answer. The second variable that we introduce here by having our feet crossed and knees behind our body is we’ve now just bent our body into a different direction. So now we’re introducing momentum that can occur. Not just this way, but momentum that can occur this way, too. We can see more swing and a more difficult ability for ourselves to control our swinging when our knees are behind our body.

Again, for somebody that struggles with pullups that’s going to be harder to control. So what we need to do is we need to settle in the middle. By settling in the middle we allow ourselves to do one thing that we don’t really get a chance to do very well in those other two positions. That is ‘plug the energy leaks’. This is a topic that I’ve talked about before in our pullup videos, and I’m going to reiterate it here today because if this is the first time you’re hearing it, it’s going to benefit you greatly.

Energy leaks are anytime that you’re trying to exert energy, or force in one direction you’re losing it in a lot of other directions that you’re not intending to. When we do a pullup we’re trying to create this vertical force up and down, but as I just talked about, any type of movement – forward, back, side to side – you’re losing a lot of that force. What we need to be able to do is prevent that and by contracting our core we can do that very, very well. But beyond that we can use our legs, we can use all the way down to our ankles and our calves. We can use the muscles there to help stabilize the body and prevent any of this dissipation of force.

So try this instead. Get into this dead-hang position and then allow your legs to come just a little bit in front of your body. From there you’re going to contract your quads as hard as you can. Straighten your knees out. Lock them out, pulling your feet down so the calves are contracting as hard as they can.

Then get into your core. Tighten your core as hard as you can. Your elbows will be a little bit in front of your body. From this position, too because we’re getting tension through the upper back as well. From here, now start executing your pullups.

The first thing you should notice is you’ve just done a lot more pullups. You’ve done a lot more because you’re actually allowing the lats to do what they’re supposed to be doing. You’re allowing the lats – the true strength of your lats – to be realized because you’ve plugged a lot of the leaks that you’ve been avoiding before and by getting yourself into this position up and down, you’ve given your body the best opportunity to do this. Not that it’s wrong to do pullups with your knees behind your body. You can actually do them from there.

You could actually plug some of the energy leaks if you’re more advanced and have a good idea about how to do it, but as someone that’s just starting out, the best way for you to be able to learn this and to do this effectively, is to get your legs up and down, just slightly in front of your body. If you have the ab strength later on and you want to challenge yourself even more, get a little bit more of that pre-stretch in the lats; then it’s fine to allow your knees to come up in front of your body as well. The bottom line is, guys, how you do every exercise matters. It’s not just “Oh, I’m doing pullups. ” How are you doing pullups?

What are you doing with your legs? What’s going on with the whole body when you’re doing an exercise? Because it all matters. If you’re looking for a program that puts the science back in strength and shows you how everything matters, head to ATHLEANX. com to get our ATHLEANX training system.

In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below. Let me know what you think and let me know what else you want to see here on this channel and I’ll do my best to cover it in the days and weeks ahead. All right, guys. See you soon.