Over a year ago, I hurt my elbow due to failed attempts at muscle ups. Turns out, you can’t just “muscle” your way through a muscle up if you don’t have the muscle to do it, otherwise you’ll just hurt yourself if you keep trying, like I did.
I ended up healing my elbow, and in a way it was a blessing because it forced me to slow things down and implement smarter programming. I also wrote a blog post on how I healed it, so hopefully it’s helping many other people out there as well. So I decided never to muscle up again until I had a very strong foundation of strength. I was deathly afraid of them.
Through careful programming (progressive exercises; baby steps), I finally was able to do a sloppy one several months ago. I will never forget that day. I wasn’t sure I could do it. It happened so fast I don’t even know how I got up there. I think my eyes were closed.
And for months I did only 1-5 MU’s a week, always being weary of not overdoing it because I didn’t want to hurt my elbow(s).
I got stronger and more confident in my ability to do them. But I was going through the motions really fast just to rush through it. So I recently started to do them a little bit slower, and I was still able to do them. And just last week, I realized that I had a bad habit of tucking my knees up to my chest.
So I wondered if I was capable of doing a slow, “strict” muscle up. (Strict meaning, without any tucking/kipping of any sort.)
Well, I tried it yesterday, and succeeded. And this video above demonstrates one of my few attempts from that day. I tried to go through the motions slowly and without leaning too much. I often say, with baby steps, you could climb any mountain. Similarly, with progression exercises, you could achieve great abilities when it comes to bodyweight exercises.
I think I want to write an ebook on how to take someone who doesn’t know anything about the still rings, to being able to do this (and maybe more).
It feels like a great journey that has just begun! And it’s always funny to think that gymnastics doesn’t even consider this a strength move. They consider it as just the way gymnasts get up on the rings. Hah! Well, at least I could do that now.
