MuscleUps

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A second write-up after ~3 months on Muscelups after the initial euphoria of the first time. Collected some data and observations by now to understand how this move is different from all the other regular pulling exercises. Differences in movements are obvious but I'm referring to things like reps/ set or session, recovery time between sessions etc. 

Unlike PullUps or ChinUps which are more or less daily affairs... there's just no way I can go with that kind of regularity, intensity or volume here. Till date after 3 months and 2 days-- it has been only 22 sessions with many outright fails!

While the "sea" of reds reflected by the zeroes started paring down in Nov... it can be seen that's because number of sessions per month were reduced compared to Sep and Oct. That is, there is more days or overall more time between sessions on a monthly basis, which also led to higher number of total reps per session in the last few up to yesterday, 13 Dec 2024. There were also some noted strength increase and adaptability to doing muscleups but it's hard to quantity this aspect though.

Taken alone, some part of the fatigue-equation will be missing because there are other exercises, running  and gym days to account for. But with so much overlapping possibilities, I've simplified somewhat to account with just other pulling exercises using monthly averages as a base, keeping those more or less constant.

Max reps per set has largely stayed the same for a couple reasons. One is because I haven't optimized recovery time. Secondly, on those days fully rested, I am beginning to execute with better form. That is minimizing kipping to get over the bar. As such rep increment progression  is slow, from the first set of 4 reps with noticeable kipping and raised knees to yesterday relatively clean 4 reps with minimal leg movement-- it took about 2 months.

By Dec, I'm dropping pullups number since the "Yearly Quota" for 2024 has already been completed and also to help focus more on muscleups for the rest of this month.


Changing out habitually formed pattern of "warm-ups" for MU training

As I was almost exclusively using the gym rack pullup bar setup at the gym for mucleups , I had the habit of doing quite a fair bit of warmup before starting a session at the gym. This I realize added to the fatigue level before the muscleups even started. For normal lifting at gym like benchpress etc is ok but for explosive movements like muscleups, it's draining and only will led to less optimal a session. Hence in the last few sessions have switched to minimal warmup and more on just the wrists and a bit of shoulders with a few slow pullups before getting straight to muscleups.

The next intermediate target now is to get to 1-2 sets of 5 reps in a session out of 5-6 sets. After which is to start adding very light weight to ramp up the process for an eventual 7-8 reps bodyweight muscleups. Side training in conjunction with other strength goals would be to convert more of the monthly pulls and dips into weighted reps as well.

Yesterday's full session...


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