Weighted chins

Hello Austin/Jordan,

I’ve decided to add weight chin-ups as a main lift for whatever reason.

I have some idea on how this would be programmed based on your templates, but I have no idea what to use as a supplemental movement.

Any recommendations/preferences on what to do as a second movement? Planning on doing chins 2x/week.

For reference I recently did 3x8 (@ 7.5, 8, 8.5 maybe?). 1@9 is +20kg (144lbs bodyweight).

May I ask how long you’ve been training and what your other lifts are at? I’m not sure this is a great idea without a pretty extensive training base, in general. I also don’t know if you need to (or should) do a supplemental movement specific for this at all, but if I was tasked with thinking of supplemental movements that would likely transfer to maximal chin-up strength here’s what I’d come up with:

  1. Chest to bar chin-ups
  2. paused chin-ups
  3. Wide grip chins
  4. Mixed grip chins
  5. neutral grip chins
  6. pull-ups
  7. L- sit chin ups
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Thanks for the recommendations on chin variants.

A bit of background info.

Age: 37
Weight: 144lbs
Training age: ~1.5 years
e1RM (lbs):
DL 322 (PR)
Bench 180 (PR), 170 (current)
Squat 197 (PR - don’t care about the squat)

Long story short, I tweaked my lower back about 3 months ago and I now have what I believe to be sciatica (or something similar) due to my incessant misapplication of your content on pain science (despite the fact that I have read your article on Pain in Training numerous times).

I can’t tolerate 2 lower back movements in a day. Even just tempo bodyweight/air squats and tempo air RDLs seem to aggravate things when done on the same day. Thus I am subbing out a squat movement and DL movement for chins so I feel like I’m still training hard whilst being pain free (and so I’ll have something else to look forward to other than benching).

I’ll move the other lower back/rehab stuff to the GPP days and conservatively go from there.

Training will look something like this (numbers indicate priority of lift):

Day 1
Squat 1 (empty bar)
Bench 2
Chins 2

Day 2
Bench 1
Squat 2 (empty bar)
Bench 4

Day 3
Chins 1
Bench 3
DL 1 (empty bar)

I probably would do 1 day a week weighted and 1 higher rep, BW if doing something like this. It may also be worth your while to get a consult for some specific guidance to get you on track here if self-managing efforts haven’t gone as well as you’d like.

Got it. Thanks for the help!