Quest for the One Arm/Hand Chin-up

photo credit: El Profe

I’m a somewhat frequent follower of the beastskills.com website. I was checking out the author’s goals and came across the 150lb weighted chin as one of them. I tried weighted chins on March 10, 2007 (that’s the nice thing about having a blog with your workouts listed, you can go back and see what you did). I remember doing a 110 lb weighted chin. Add my bodyweight into that and we’re talking about a 290 lb or so chin up. I remember pulling like hell to get that one.

My concerns with weighted chins are safety and injury. I’d like to try it again with maybe 135 pounds strapped around my waist (dip belt). That much weight brings about some safety concerns. You don’t want to slip and fall with 135 extra pounds swinging around. Last time I tried this, I hurt my lower back. I assume it was from the weight strapped around it. I looked into getting a weight vest but those things cost a fortune the heavier they get. On thinking about it some more, even a 60-80 lb weight vest would remove a lot of the weight from a dip belt. In other words, you could use a weight vest and dip belt in combination. I’ll look into it. Until then, I may give it another try and see if I can do a 135 lb weighted chin.