If you're pulling as hard and as fast as you possibly can and you're still just crashing your chest into the bar at best, you probably don't have a strength problem. High pull-ups aren't just a deeper version of a normal pull-up. They're a different skills sitting on three separate things and if you're only training one of them, you're going to stall out exactly where you are right now. I'm going to give you all three, strength, power and technique, but I'll tell you now which one moves the fastest. It's the third one. I've watched people see real increases in their height just within a session from simple changes to their grip and their timing with no extra strength required and we'll get there, but that only actually holds up if the first two are already there underneath it. So, we'll build this properly. Despite what some followers seem to think, I didn't start with high pull-ups. I spent over a decade training MMA and then when I retired from that, I stacked on a ton of weight and lost a whole lot of that explosive fitness that I had. Going through the actual process of getting that all back while also studying as a sports chiropractor and learning about the actual physiology behind what makes this happen is what helped actually lay the methods and tools out in front of me. And these days I'm pushing over 15 clean muscle-ups, 120 kilos, moving more than an additional one and a half times my body weight on weighted dips and making pull-ups look easy. And none of that came from just adding more pull-up reps. Before anything else, let's fix your target because this one change does more than most people expect. The chin over the bar is the baseline and that's a pull-up, but not a high pull-up and most people who start chasing high just keep trying to aim for their chest. Don't. Aim for your waist. I know how that sounds right now, but that's exactly the point. When you're training to smash the bar into your belly, everything below that starts to get easy fast. Chest height stops being a fight, muscle-ups stop being a fight because you're not scraping over the bar anymore, you're arriving above it with room to spare. Plus, aiming lower from the start starts to dial in some of the technical details that you'll need to actually achieve these high pull-ups long-term and skip some of the stuff in between where you just end up getting stuck banging it into your chest. Number one, you need more pulling muscle, specifically bigger, stronger lats. And here's the bit that surprises people. We need lats and we need elbow flexors, mainly the brachioradialis, which is that elbow muscle on the thumb side of your forearm, if we're doing normal pull-ups. But those elbow muscles matter a whole lot less for a high pull-up because a high pull-up is one at the very bottom of the pull, not the top. Off a dead hang, your elbow is almost straight and your arm is directly overhead, so there's barely any elbow bend available to make force with. What's actually driving you up out of that position is your shoulder pulling your arm down and back towards your body. That's your lats, that's teres major, and it's also the muscle nobody expects, your pecs. Specifically, the lower pec that goes from the shoulder to the rib. From overhead, your pecs' line of pull is almost perfectly set up to drag that arm straight back down in front of you. It's a huge part of your initial acceleration, and if you've never trained it specifically hard in that position, that's free height that you're leaving on the table. So, the staple is a heavy weighted pull-ups and hard body weight variations like archer pull-ups. Heavy meaning actually heavy, which is around your five rep max or even heavier, not going for sets of 10 or 15 reps. And no matter how good everything else gets, you just can't skip the need for this muscle. Your body is like a car, your brain and your nervous system is the driver, and you can get better at using that driver and you will get better results in the form of your coordination and your timing and your technique all getting better together and more refined, but there's on it. You can put an F1 driver in an absolute lemon of a car, and no matter how good they are, they're still not going to be able to beat something that just has a much more powerful engine. So, build those muscles which are your primary engine while you're refining the skill and becoming a better driver at the same time. Number two, power is speed and strength put together. And here's what most people get wrong, that you don't get speed for free just by getting stronger. The rate that your nervous system can send signals to your muscles and make them fire up hard and fast is a skill in and of itself and it's an adaptation or an improvement that you have to train for specifically that won't just come as a side effect of just pulling heavier and heavier loads. If speed came for free with strength, all the biggest heaviest squatters in the world would all have some of the best vertical jump heights, but they don't. You won't get good at dunking a basketball just by hitting heavy squats in the gym and performing a high pull-up is almost entirely a power problem. You can't keep trying to grind slow reps all the way up to your belly. You get one shot at a good timed explosive initial part of the pull that's going to generate the vast majority of that force that you need to reach that height that you're after. Three ways to train it. One, take your weighted pull-ups, dial the weight down just a little bit, keep the reps super low, and then perform the very bottom initiation of the pull as explosively and violently as possible. We're still moving heavy loads, but every rep starts with maximal intent to move as fast as possible. The reps still won't be fast, but the intent and the activation will be. Two, front lever raises. Start in a hang and then pull as fast as possible up into a front lever. As high as you can get. Bent knees or straddle or full variations are all options here to dial the difficulty. Whatever lets you get some good explosive movement out of the very bottom of that hang. And here's the important part, it doesn't actually matter how high you get because we're not really training the front lever here. Watch these two side by side. This is a front lever raise and this is a high pull-up and the arm path and initiation of that shoulder movement are exactly the same between the two. Same starting position, same shoulder, same arm path, same explosive pull pulling yourself back away from the bar. The only difference is where your body ends up after and the involvement of those elbow muscles. So, every rep of that raise is a rep of the exact initiation you're trying to get faster at that's going to generate a huge amount of your initial momentum with the high pull-up. Three, and this is the one people resist, train the high pull-up itself with a band with as much assistance as it takes to make it look fast. Because to teach your brain to fire the right muscles in the right order at exactly the right time at speed, you have to actually be able to perform it at speed. Grinding out slow, ugly reps teaches your brain how to get good at grinding out more slow, ugly reps. So, use enough band assistance that you can hit that lower chest all that way. If you can't get there, add more band assistance. Don't lower the target. And no sloppy sets. The second you slow down and lose that height, the set is over. Even if you've got reps left in you, we only want quality reps because you don't get faster by training slow, you get faster by showing your brain what fast feels like over and over again. Now, stacking heavy strength work and fast explosive speed work is exactly where people start to crash and burn if they're trying to train these together. And I'll come back to managing that at the end. It's one of the single most common things I end up having to discuss with members in my community when they're trying to manage the mix of the two and still see good results without running into some plateaus and stalling their progress. The speed and the strength work can both be there, but if the dosing isn't right, the timing isn't right, and how you spread that out throughout your week isn't right, along with a number of other factors that can influence your performance and results, it's so easy for the balancing act to be off. And then they're coming to me trying to work out why nothing's changed for them in a couple of months. Number three, and we're on the one that I talked about at the start, technique. High pull-up technique is not just normal pull-up technique. If you take everything you know about a strict normal pull-up and just try to do it harder and faster and higher, you'll just crash into the bar every single time. Because a strict pull-up is a mostly vertical line of pull, straight up into the bar, which is fine when you're stopping at your chin. But when you're trying to get the bar down to your waist, that vertical path has nowhere left to go. You run out of room, and your chest will just hit the bar. Four fixes. One, the grip. You do this before everything else. You want to get an over grip, which means reaching your hands further over the top of the the so that your knuckles are pointed up at the sky instead of hanging off the front of it. Two reasons. First, it puts your wrists in a position where the muscles around them can actually assist the pull instead of just hanging on. Second, and this is the one that quietly costs people height. If you start with your wrists already near the end of their range, you'll run out of wrist before you run out of pull. You physically stop rising because you start to have to actually fight the extension of your wrist as it starts to run out when you start to rotate up and over the bar as you get high enough. Start with them over and around the bar and you've already got the range to finish the rep without having to change that grip. Two, the swing. You want a slight swing same as you'd use for a muscle up. Time the start of your explosive pull with the start of your back swing so that your fast vertical pull plus the backwards travel of the swing takes your body around and behind the bar instead of straight into it. That's not cheating, that's the path that this movement actually needs to direct that line of pull properly. Three, the arm path. You want the bar in front of you and much lower on your body, which means your elbows have to come out in front of you, not pull down to your sides like they might do for a normal pull-up. The cue is try to bend the bar. Squeeze the elbows towards each other as you pull. That does two jobs. It forces your arms into exactly the position that you want and it wakes up your pecs and lats right at the moment you start pulling. Four, the tap. This is the difference between a decent rep and a clean one. You pull back behind the bar and keep that separation between you and the bar for as long as you can and only then right as you peak, you pull the bar into yourself and tap your body to it. Aiming for just under that chest or that waist if you're really chasing that real target. Then you separate again and come down the exact same way but in reverse. Why do we do this? Because that separation is what keeps your lats in their best leverage for the longest possible time. Pull yourself into the bar early and you kill your own leverage halfway up, but if you save that tap for the very top and your rear delts and triceps polish off that last bit of height. And that's what turns a rep that's technically high into a rep that actually looks high and finished. All right, the thing I said I would come back to. You've now got three things to train: strength, power, and technique. Strength, maximum speed, and a skill. And trying to mix that combination together is exactly what gets people overtrained, watching your progress stop dead, and then wondering why it's starting to go backwards. There's two rules that'll help save you most of that trouble. One, speed and skill work comes first while you're fresh. A tired nervous system can't produce speed. If you do your heavy pull-ups and then you try to do your banded pull-ups at the end of the session, you're not training speed anymore. You're training a slow rep with a slow brain and tired muscles, and you're reinforcing the exact thing that you're trying to get rid of. Two, track it or you're guessing. Your height, your speed, your band assistance, and how many reps until that all starts to degrade. If you're not tracking it, you can't tell the difference between I need another week here to get better, or this stopped working 3 weeks ago. That's how people get stuck trying to fight their way through a plateau for months without even realizing that their training's broken. How much of each and how they get spread across your week depends on your training age, what else you're doing, and how you recover. It's the thing I get asked about the most, and it's why there's a whole course on it in my community at the Structural Strength Collective, working through exactly how you sequence strength, skill, and power work without them just derailing each other. The part that usually gets people every time is how much less speed work you need when the quality is good and you place it where it's supposed to be. This is also the kind of thing that most generic programs just fail to account for. Over three quarters of the research in sports science fields that we've actually got now that's good and reliable has come out only in the last 10 or 15 years, and that huge surge of research has meant that the gap between what's traditionally practiced and the actual state of where research is at has gotten wider than it's ever been before, meaning that the quality of any random training program out there has unfortunately never been worse. And if you've got specific goals like we do with calisthenics, where speed, power, or strength might be interest of yours, but in completely different ratios to someone else. Understanding how to balance these in your own program is an essential understanding that you need to get for yourself if you want to actually train in a way that's conducive to your outcomes. So, you won't get higher by spamming pull-ups. You get higher by aiming at your waist instead of your chest, building the muscle to pull with, training the speed separately and intentionally, and learning a technique that's genuinely different from the pull-up that you already know. Get these right in the right order, and this stops being something that you're chasing blind and starts being something that you actually understand. I put the whole thing on one page, every cue from today, the exercises, and my favorite tips for this. They're all in my pulling power cheat sheet. The link is in the description and it's free. Go grab it so you've actually got it for your next session.