Can it be done by mere mortals, puny humans, or even the Hulk?
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.