Every now and then I like doing a high rep chin up with knee raise set. There are so many benefits to high intensity training and my favorite one is saving time.
A powerful exercise for the upper body
High rep chins really work your grip and forearms. It’s tough hanging onto the bar and just by doing this exercise you’ll get an incredibly strong grip. The good news about developing a strong grip is that it makes you stronger overall. Yes, having a strong grip makes you stronger overall—it’s like a strength boost.
Your biceps, your shoulders, your lats, your stomach, your chest, and more are all worked to varying degrees in this exercise. Doing just chins and dips and will develop a tremendously strong, well-balanced upper body.
A breathing and concentration exercise
Work the exercise in a slow and controlled manner and coordinate your breathing to the motion. It becomes meditative. The focus becomes the breath and on the inhale you suck the fatigue out of the muscles and on the exhale you blow it out. It’s a very powerful technique.
You need to concentrate when doing this exercise. This exercise helps you develop the capacity to concentrate, and focus your attention. There are many advantages to learning this skill but the main one here is that you can get a much better workout in much less time. The caveat is that this is not stuff that beginners should do, you have to be in reasonable shape to begin with. By training this way, you’ll get more of a workout in 3 minutes than many get in 15 minutes. It’s a fast way to get strong and learn your body.
A test to maintain form
The trick to this is don’t sacrifice form. Seeking a particular number of reps sometimes makes you want to sacrifice form. Don’t. Slow and controlled, disciplined. It’s not an exercise, it’s training, and if you’re gonna get better results in the fraction of the time, you’re gonna have to put your focus 100% on what you are doing.
Here’s a recent set I did. I like filming these things because I can see things I want to improve. The lighting, the sound, and I’d like to pause longer at the bottom and top. The short pausing are a subtle way of cheating to get more reps. So is the rep speed. With the form in the video I did 15 chins and 14 knee raises. With improved form I’d do fewer reps, but that’d be progress.