Quest for the One Arm/Hand Chin-up

I was working out last night thinking about the possibility of a one hand chin up and wondered if doing two handers with weight strapped around my waist would help. It would take out the balance necessary for a one hander but would help build the brute strength necessary to do a one hander. For example, if you go to the point where you could strap your body weight on and do some two handers, I imagine a one hander wouldn’t be too far away. I may send an email to my friends over at dragondoor.com and see what they have to say.

Arnow and Lechner at dragondoor.com say that youth and less bodyweight are the keys to success with the one hand chinup. I’m not exactly young at 37 and not really light at 175 but maybe I can drop five pounds more and aid my cause. Arnow in his 60′s and Lechner weighing in at 205 lbs. still did ‘em so I have a shot.

A week and a half until the Arnold Pump and Run and my bench press workouts haven’t been too great recently. I did the workout below except just did two of 260 and 1 of 270 and skipped 280 altogether. Some days you just don’t have it. Will report more on one arm comedowns part 2 soon.

Two weeks until the big event – the Arnold Pump and Run here in Columbus, Ohio. For me, that means two more weeks to get some decent running in and one more hard bench press workout. Hopefully, I can avoid the ultimate workout destroyer (snow shoveling) and do my pyramid bench workout one more time:

8-200
6-220
4-240
3-260
2-270
1-280
4-240

From there the trick is to bench press 175 as many times as possible. 20 or more is my goal. I hope to run the 5k in close to 19 minutes. I ran 4 miles today in 30 minutes. I’ll need to run Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday for the rest of the week.

Past results -
2003 18 reps of 170 and 5k in 19:26; 108 among men and 122 overall
2006 16 reps of 180 and 5k in 20:22; 149 among men and 162 overall

goal 2007 – 21 reps of 175 and 5k in 19:15

I’ve been kind of training for a one hand chin up for quite some time now. Unfortunately, my training has been all wrong. I thought that I could train for such a feat using the Gravitron 2000 (a machine used for chin ups, pull ups and dips that allows you to subtract weight from your body weight). Most people use the Gravitron 2000 to do assisted chin ups or dips with two hands. I was using it to do assisted one handed pull ups. Actually my grip was between that of a chin up and a pull up (palms would face each other if doing a two handed chinup). I was able to do a one hander with just 10 pounds on the Gravitron 2000, but the Gravitron requires you to stand on a platform. Doing so allows you to cheat a little bit. If you bend your knees at the bottom, you get a little momentum going back up. As I learned later after stumbling upon this site, the Gravitron doesn’t require you to develop the balance necessary to do a one hand chin up either.

By the way, this is a TRUE one handed chin up. The other arm dangles completely free and doesn’t hold on to anything.

As Jack Arnow and Alex Lechner recommend in their site, I revamped my training by doing the alternate one arm come downs. These are basically negative reps of a one arm chinup. Arnow and Lechner give a detailed description of these on their site so suffice it to say that you pull yourself up with two arms; let go with one arm; and lower yourself as slowly as possible. Pull yourself back up again; let go with the other arm; and lower yourself as slowly as possible. Of course, I did a good warmup of 3 sets of 10 for wide grip pull ups beforehand. These one arm come downs are absolute hell. If you don’t believe me, try one and see if you can lower yourself longer than one tenth of a second. Or try one and see if you don’t rip your arm right out of its socket.

These things are brain synapse deleterious. You lose the mind power to even count what rep you are on when you do them for the first time. I can see how you can either build enormous strength from doing these or simply end up in a nursing home before age 40 as a result. Well, hopefully nobody else will be dressing me any time soon. I had to laugh at Arnow and Lechner’s advice to not even bother doing curls to build arm strength at the same time. After one session, I can see that they were exactly right. Surprisingly, two days later, my triceps and shoulders are the most sore.

I’ll try another session of the amputee makers in a few days and report again with my findings.