How anyone can achieve a one-arm chinup in 3 minutes a week

About five years ago I stopped doing chin-ups, pull-ups, lap pull downs, any other vertical pulling movement, and I cut my weekly training of this movement pattern down to just one weekly set of less than three minutes. In that time, I took my strength from a couple of shitty chin-ups to a one arm chin Up. Along the way, I’ve taught a bunch of other people to make the same gains from a complete beginner level up to where you see my strength now. So I want to show you now how I did this step-by-step, we’re going to cover progressions, how to scale the difficulty, how to hit the perfect weekly training volume, and how to measure that weekly progress so that even if you can’t do a single chin up yet, you can start getting stronger and with enough time eventually build to a one arm channel yourself and have the physique that comes along with that.
All we need to do is a set of gymnastics rings with an adjustable heart and your body. Alright, so first up progressions. What we need first is to make sure that you’ve got a way of training this movement regardless of where your strength is at now through full range of motion so that you can actually train the movement. Because if you tried to start with one arm chin-ups, you’re not going to be able to get anywhere. You’re not going to be able to train any of the range of motion and it’s utterly unhelpful. So progressions for the one arm chin are really quite simple. Think about what makes this movement difficult. It’s the amount of weight that is on our pulling arm. Obviously when you’ve got your whole body weight, it’s very difficult. So if we can just take some of that body weight off the pulling arm, then we now have progressions that are easier and with this it’s very simple to do that.
You just put the rings at a height where your feet can reach the floor and then suddenly you can actually have all your weight on your feet rather than you pulling hand. Now you’re able to support yourself through it, so as long as you can do a body weight squat, then you can help yourself through this movement with zero weight on the pulling arm and we found absolute zero level difficulty. You can also use your other arm on the other ring, so you can hold on with that to give you some assistance. We don’t want to overdo this because that arm’s got to work as well. It’ll get tired, so as long as we’ve got our feet there to guide us through it, we’re good. The important thing here is that you set yourself up so that you can train full range of motion because general principle with strength training, if we don’t train across a full range of motion, we don’t gain strength across that full range of motion.
And when we’re talking about functionality and having mobility, we want full range of motion strength so that our body is capable of moving through the full range of motion that our joints capable of because that’s what’s going to set us up to be the most injury resistant and be able to do the most things with our body, have the least amount of pain and stiffness. So we want to be able to train full range. So for this movement, what range of motion looks like is basically moving from full shoulder flexion. You can think about being in a dead hang at the bottom of this movement all the way up to where your wrist physically touches your chest. Once you’ve made that contact there, then we’ve finished the movement pattern of vertical pooling and then you’re done. So you can very clearly think about dead hang all the way up to making contact wrist to chest, that’s one full range motion positive.
Then you reverse it on the way down. So now regardless of where your strength is, you’re moving through that full range of motion. Even if you’re super weak and you’re tired from doing previous reps, you’ve got no strength in you. You can still train for range motion reps. Now we can talk about how to scale the difficulty from there up so that we actually make it stimulating, make it maximally difficult and are able to stimulate your body to go away and build muscle and grow stronger in response to that stimulation. Because if we’re not working at our strength limit, then we’re giving our body no reason to adapt to grow. And so what we need to do is put weight back on that arm basically until we find our strength threshold. Remember, you can think about the movement in terms of the strength curve. So at the bottom and the top, this movement’s going to be a little easier.
You’re going to be able to exert more force towards the middle. It’s going to be most difficult middle bottom sort of area. And so we need to be constantly adapting how heavy we make this. If we want to work at our strength threshold, we’ve got to constantly be adjusting how much load we do put on that working arm so that yes, we get all the way up to maximum effort required max strength output, but when we get stuck here and we’re unable to do it, we can reduce down, make it possible, and then when it gets easier, we’re not here with this gap because that gap means that if it’s way easier than we’re capable of and we’re just blasting through the rep, then it’s not stimulating us. When it gets easy, we can bring it back up, find failure so that all the way through the whole range of motion we keep.
And so the way to do this is reasonably simple. As I said, we’re just putting weight back on the working arm. So you can think about trying to constantly take your feet off the ground, take your assisting arm off the ring and putting all that body weight or as much as we can back on the working arm, the one that’s doing the chin up. And I think the best way to make sure you are finding this threshold, finding this point of maximum effort, as with all movements, is forcing the negatives. Because if we do a forced centric, not only is that the heaviest work we can possibly do because we’re stronger lowering than we are going up, that’s just a physiological fact. So not only do we get the most heavy growth stimulating progress stimulating work when we do a force negative and eccentric a lowering phase, that’s impossible, but we’re trying to resist.
But we also know that we are actually at our limit because if we’re actively trying to pull our bodies up to pull the ring down towards us and despite that best effort, we’re being forced to lower, we’re having our arm literally p pried away from us. If that’s happening, then we know we’ve found our limit. We’re just above this curve, and then if we even remotely match that on our positives, then we know our training’s doing a good job. We’re working as hard as possible. And so that’s what you can do it basically every point in the rep, you can just try and take all the help away until you find yourself being forced down and you think in your head about doing the positive. And as you do that, as you try and pull yourself up, you take enough help away that you’re actually pushed down.
And by doing this in increments, if you break the movement into 20 different reps and try this a bunch of different times, then you give yourself a chance at each of those little increments to adjust the difficulty to just the right level for you to force you down for that negative and then the way up to make it so that you get stuck and then adjust and then you go again. And so that’s it. Eventually with enough of this, you’ll be using less and less body weight until it’s your entire body weight on that arm for some of the rep and with enough time you’ll be able to do the whole thing. So let’s talk about frequency and training volume. The protocol for this that we use really simple. It’s one set once a week. So you show up to your rings, you start training, you do a positive, you do a negative, you switch arms, you do that on the other side and depending on how long these reps take you, it’s going to require a different amount of reps.
But basically you just keep going, alternating arms, one rep, another rep working constantly at your threshold, adjusting things as needed so that you’re always even at the top, even at the bottom, always fighting maximally to earn each inch of range that you train. You can stop and reset in between each rep, but we want to not rest. We want to keep this for the sake of the protocol and simplicity and your ability to just lock in and go as hard as possible. We just want to keep it as one continuous set so you can break for a second, reset, keep going, and here is how you get the perfect amount of training volume for your body every week and maximise progress. It’s very simple. As soon as you need to stop and have a rest, you’re done for the week. As soon as you can no longer go as hard as possible, as soon as you’re no longer willingly attacking the rep and able to give it everything you’ve got in your soul that’s you done for the week, go away and rest.
Allow your body to recover, come back and train this again in a week’s time. Another way you can think about this is just stopping as soon as it’s no longer fun. So as soon as you’re no longer having a positive experience and wanting to actively do another rep and train again and keep training train as hard as possible, as soon as that becomes a drag or a chore or you’ve got to hype yourself up to do the next rep, don’t do it. Stop because your body is genius in sending you these signals as to how much is productive and what’s worthwhile work to do. Once you’re finding that training goes from a positive thing that you’re excited to do to something like, oh, it’s a drag, it’s negative. You’ve reached this tipping point, this threshold where now more work is not, your body’s not going to be able to recover from it this week.
It’s not going to be able to do any more growth in response to this training. The work you’re doing from now is just impeding on its ability to recover. It’s split into more damage, more tendon strain. There’s no incremental advantage to doing more, and your body tells you this. We’ve just been so conditioned not to listen to it. So if you just clue into that and say, okay, it’s no longer fun, your body’s essentially telling you in all our experience that you’ve maxed out the productive signal. You’ve maxed out what is going to get you gains for the week. And so from then on you’re better off resting, sleeping, eating, allowing that muscle building process to happen and then coming back and stimulating it again once it’s recovered in a week’s time. And so you do that, you come back next week, you train again.
The idea is that over time, because we’re always matching our strength threshold with time, that threshold will increase. And as it does so too will the intensity of your training. As soon as your strength is a little bit higher, your training that week is going to be a little bit heavier and you’re going to be able to measure that with time. The way you do that is by measuring your maximum strength on your first rep of training for the week. So you rock up to the rings and you realise one week, oh look, I’m able to use a little less assistance. I’m able to control a bit of the negative with one arm. I’m able to do some positive range of motion here before I get stuck. Anything that shows you that your maximum strength has increased is a sign of progress and we want to be seeing that weekly, especially in the early days.
And so when you’re a long way off the full thing, it can be quite hard to know, well, I’m so far of doing it. How do I even measure any progress? There’s things you can do to test the lower stages as well. And so in our system we have a series of strength milestones to reach the early days, the things you want to look for first, can I do a partial range of motion? Chin up two hands, and you can test this. I recommend testing this at the start before you start your working set, do a test of your strength before you start training to see how training from the previous weeks has affected your overall strength. So you can start with a two arm chin up, just seeing can I get any range of motion. And then as your strength increases, you’ll see more and more range become available to you.
Once you’re getting a full range, two arm chin up, that’ll be your first milestone is to get all the way from touching wrist to chest from a dead hand. Then you can start to look at single arm stuff. So you can look at, can I control some of the negative? And then your next journey will be how much range of motion you can control on a one arm chin up negative. Once you’re getting the full negative, you can start to look at positives, partial positives, and then eventually by this point when you’re getting partial range of motion positive one arm chin, then you are well on your way very close to being able to do the full thing. So it’s super important that you measure that strength and monitor it weekly, not just for the sake of motivation and being inspired and being excited to train, but to know that your training’s actually working.
It’s really important that you see feedback from your training sets to know, oh, it’s working. If it’s not, there’s likely something wrong. You may be nowhere near the level of intensity you needed. You may be trying to do way too much still because it’s so ingrained in you and you’re just not allowing yourself to get to that level of intensity because you’re trying to do too much weekly work. You might not be recovering properly. Again, that might be because you’re doing too much or there’s other factors not in place. You might not be hitting enough protein, and so it’s really important that you can see weekly strength is increasing, everything is working okay. If something changes with that, then there may be something you need to fix to get things back on track. So make sure you have some sort of baseline that you’re monitoring every week with your training so that you can over time monitor it and early days, weekly, later on monthly, know that strength is increasing, you’re on track.
And from there, it is simply a process of coming back weekly training as hard as possible. Watching that strength incrementally go up, and the closer you get to this full one arm chin up, the more insane your overall physics is going to get. The more muscle mass you’re going to have, the leaner you’re going to be, and things like chin-ups and other pulling movements, again, quickly become so easy for you that you’ll never look to use those sorts of things again. So that is how you can build all the way to a one arm chin up from scratch. It’s a pretty simple process. It’s not easy. A huge thing a lot of people get wrong is trying to overdo it and bully themselves into doing way too much work, which then decreases the quality of the training that they do. It decreases the intensity and just having that emotional resistance makes it really hard to be consistent as well.
So there are no upsides to doing too much. As soon as you reach that threshold of not enjoying things, it is really important that you call your training quits there from both a consistency standpoint and enjoyment, which is huge, but also from a recovery standpoint, giving your body the space it needs to go and do the growth, apply the changes based on the signal you’ve sent it so that you can actually come back stronger next week, not just fatigued and avoid things like tendonitis, tennis elbow muscle strains, et cetera. Really important point that I think a lot of people undervalue. If you’re training at max intensity, you need to limit the amount you do to just the stuff that you want to do and then just be able to keep repeating it weekly long-term. Hope this is useful for you. If you’ve got questions or anything on it, chuck them in the comments below. If you want more of a deep dive into the overall process, the method, how you can apply this amongst the other five movements too. Completely transform body free video training in the link in the description below. But otherwise, get out there, start training one on chin ups, and I’ll see you in the next video.

I stopped doing vertical pulling exercises like chin-ups and pull-ups 5 years ago and instead cut my training of this movement pattern down to one set of less than 3 minutes per week. This allowed me to progress from being able to do only a few chin-ups to being able to do a one-arm chin-up.

The key points of the method are:

• Use progressions to train full range of motion every single rep. You can put your feet on the ground to reduce the weight on your arms.

• Gradually add more weight to the working arm until you reach your strength limit, using forced negatives to find this limit.

• Train this movement pattern once a week, stopping the set as soon as it is no longer enjoyable or you can no longer perform the reps with maximum effort.

• Track your progress by measuring your maximum ability on the first rep of each week’s training session, or by using a test rep before you start training.

Following this protocol consistently over time will allow you to build up to being able to perform a one-arm chin-up, from any starting point.