The Pull Up and Chin Up are two of the most popular bodyweight exercises in the world. You can do each of these exercises any time, with simple, basic equipment. What’s the difference between these two manoeuvres and which is the best one for you?

Both of these manoeuvres involve gripping an overhead bar and raising your body upward until your chin is higher than the bar. The difference is essentially in the direction you grasp the bar. A Pull Up is done with an overhand grip where your hands are positioned shoulder width or further apart. When you do a chin up, simply position your hands at shoulder width apart, in an underhand position.

You can slightly alter these grips to target the muscles in a number of angles, but overall, this is the typical way these routines are accomplished.

There are two significant things that differentiate these exercises, as similar as they may seem at first:

1. Pull ups focus on the upper back area, and use the shoulders and biceps simply as support. It puts more strain on the back muscles to work than a chin up does.

2. Chin ups are physically simpler to accomplish, since your biceps will be doing much of the work, taking the tension off of your back. This makes it easier for you to do more reps.

I recommend doing either of these exercises before any focused bicep routine as you need the biceps to be as fresh as you need them to be when you’re going through these exercises to make it easier for you to do more reps.

Should you do pull ups or chin ups?

Not one of these exercises is greater than the other. It mainly comes down to how fit you are. Pull Ups are very difficult to do, mainly for beginners, so you may opt to develop your strength gradually with chin ups. Many people who are in good shape opt for pull ups as they’re the more challenging exercise, developing more strength and stimulating the muscles more effectively. Depending on what you want to focus on, will help you decide what exercise is better for you. Chin ups target the biceps, while pull ups attack the back.

Still, one of the basics to long term fitness progress is change, so you can start to mix it up a bit, doing both Pull Ups and Chin Ups periodically, occasionally even in the same workout. Both of these are challenging and widely valuable back exercises. Each will help you improve strength and form muscle tissue fast.

Learn more about pullup bars. Stop by Arthur Name’s site where you can find out all about the best pullup bar and what it can do for you.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 7:03 am and is filed under Exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.