Chin ups are easier than pull ups because you use your biceps to squeeze your arms together at the top of a chin up and thereby shorten their range of motion. Pull ups require more strength from your lats to lift your body weight as well as flexion of your elbows (which is necessary for a full range of motion).
Pullups are a popular and effective exercise for strengthening your upper back and biceps.
An overhand grip pull-up is the hardest to do, because it places more of the workload on your lats. The wider your grip, the less help your lats get from other muscles, making a rep harder.
For example, using an underhand grip -- called a chin-up -- requires the use of your biceps and is the easiest. Easiest to hardest, the grips are underhand, neutral, narrow, standard and wide.
Because you are not doing the exercise right. The majority of the people in the gym do back exercises wrong. They pull with their biceps instead of doing the movement in such a way as to take the biceps out.
To complete a full pull-up, you have to lift your body upward from a dead hang position to bring your chin above the pull-up bar. Pull-ups use an overhand grip on the bar, as opposed to the underhand grip of chin-ups.
Chin-ups can be a great biceps exercise. In fact, they can even be a great main biceps exercise: they're a big, heavy compound lift that works our biceps through a large range of motion … sometimes.
Any number above 8 for men and 3 for women is very good.
You are in the highest percentile if you can do 12 to 15 pull-ups or more with good form.
And if you can't do pull-ups, this may be why: Not being able to hold onto the bar through lack of grip strength. A lack of latissimus dorsi (large back muscle), spinal erector (lower back stabilizer muscles), abdominal muscle, and biceps strength. A lack of “mind-to-muscle” connection.
The chin up is the easiest variation of the pull up and is performed with your palms facing towards you, in an underhand (supinated) grip, this exercise allows use of the biceps a little more and is definitely the first type of pull up you should strive to master.
The Australian Pull-up is great because it is very easy to change the difficulty of the exercise. Lowering the bar or rings closer to the ground makes the exercise more challenging. The height of the bar is usually between your hip (easier) and your knees (more difficult).
Get underneath the horizontal bar and get a shoulder-width grip on it. Just like you would in a level inverted row, push your shoulder blades together and puff out your chest. Inhale into your belly and then pull the bar toward your chest.
Pullups use your lats and biceps primarily, while also recruiting your deltoids, rhomboids, and core. These are the muscles you'll need to strengthen. We've curated five exercises as a starting point to train for pullups.
The Australian pull-up targets the upper body muscles including the latissimus dorsi, biceps, rear deltoids, abdominal muscles, and forearms muscles. It also targets the lower body muscle groups such as the glutes, quadriceps, and hamstrings as these muscles will have to be engaged to help stabilize the body.
Gymnasts don't do regular curls, but their abundance in straight-arm work is what is largely responsible for their exceptional arm development. If you picture a gymnast performing an iron cross, think of the enormous strain and tension on the biceps to maintain the position.
If you do pullups like I just described, 20 in a row is a great standard to aim for. The vast majority of guys can't do that. If you get to 20 reps, it tends to be a game changer for your upper body strength.
If you woud rather opt-in for the second choice – you need the right type of training to get you there. Bodybuilder and calisthenics athlete walk into a bar… Most won't be able to do this exercise because he lacks the strength and mobility in his scapula and wrists.
Most bodybuilders do not use push-ups to develop these muscles, as they can do so many; it is more of an endurance workout than a muscle building workout. True muscle building workouts involved sets with a very maximum of 12 reps, and it's usually less than 8 reps.
If you practice 1 or 2 reps with additional weight (10 or more pounds), bodyweight pull ups start to feel a lot easier. Your nervous system adapts quickly so that you can do more pull ups. Of course, you need to be careful. Don't train to failure.
Thirteen-year-old males are expected to perform three pullups. Fourteen-year-olds are expected to perform 2 more reps for a total of 5 reps for meeting the 50th percentile. Fifteen-year-olds are expected to complete 6 reps; while 16-year-olds typically do 7 reps, and 18-year-olds do 8 reps.
It is no secret that being a few pounds lighter will make it easier to do pull-ups and will help you not to hurt as much while running.
The best pull-up grip for biceps is the supinated (underhand) grip, also known as the chin-up. The biceps are mainly recruited with the hand in the supinated position, contributing heavily to the chin-up.
Generally, chinups are a little bit easier than pullups, meaning that you can probably do more repetitions using a chinup grip than a pullup grip.
To make things straightforward, the chin up is more effective at building muscle and strength in the biceps, but the pull up is great too. With pull ups, the more narrow your grip, the bigger role the biceps will play. With wide grip pull ups, your biceps are playing a much smaller role, placing emphasis on your lats.