Kipping Pull Ups are Cheating!

In my 16 years as a CrossFit enthusiast and Trainer I have encountered the claim that kipping pull ups are cheating, injurious or simply ‘stupid’ on hundreds of occasions. These claims come from a lack of broader experience outside of the commenters’ own limited exercise regimens and a lack of understanding of the movement itself and indeed the laws of Newtonian physics and thermodynamics. Let’s try to put this issue to bed.

First, let me state for the record that CrossFit, though known for the widespread implementation of the kipping pull up, still strongly advocates for the prior development of the strict pull up under their charter of: mechanics, consistency and then intensity. Any member of CrossFit Glasgow will recognise dead hangs, negative pull ups and strict pull ups as staples of both warm ups and skill development. If you come to one of our packed Early Bird sessions on a Saturday, you can guarantee that you’re developing strict pull ups within minutes of starting.

We also regularly practice the shapes required to perform the kipping pull up and, where appropriate, employ them in the execution of our workouts. The prerequisite of having capacity in strict pull ups before performing kipping pull ups is a part of our own development pathway but does not preclude the learning of the fundamentals in the kip. Every one of our Trainers have completed the CrossFit Preferred “The Gymnastics Course” led by industry expert, Nathan Bird and his team.

Even before social media really took off, detractors in the bodybuilding and powerlifting spheres would write scathing posts on blog sites and forums about the phenomenon as if it were some great affront to their God. Now, you barely need to scroll through the comments section of any article from the CrossFit Games to find some keyboard warrior lambasting the kipping pull up.

Here are some of my favourites:

     “CrossFitters love to cheat themselves. Kipping isn’t a pull up, it’s just momentum doing the work”

    “I don’t care what anyone says, kipping is pointless unless your goal is to get injured.”

    “If you have to use momentum to get your chin over the bar, you’re not strong enough to do a pull up, period.”

The most common thread is that kipping serves no function in developing physical strength or and in the comments above, we see that it is considered ‘cheating’ because it is presumed to be easier than a strict pull up and driven purely by momentum.

But these commenters see the kip through the lens of a lack of broader experience and probably only typically see the bodybuilding variant with back arched, grip set wide and legs crossed behind the individual. Putting aside the ironic deficiencies in form that these people typically employ, we should consider both the strict and kipping pull up performed in their intended manner as both being of advantage to an athlete in separate domains.

Both variations of the pull up are intended to perform the same task – to raise the athlete from a hanging position under a bar, until their chin passes above the horizontal plane of the bar. The distance to the bar is the same in either case and the mass of the athlete is the same in either variation, which makes the calculations of the work being done pretty simple.

Both variations require sufficient upper body strength to stabilise the shoulder and transmit force vertically toward the bar. Both variations are upper body movements and whether you are completing 4 sets of 12 in your string vest; or a set of 30 in crew length socks with your shirt off, you’re feeling it in your forearms, biceps, triceps, latissimus dorsii, rotator cuff, spinal erectors, chest and abs to a greater or lesser degree depending on the variant employed.

The strict pull up is performed from a dead hang and, preferably – for the purpose of building effective transferable positions and habits – in a hollow body position, which will be covered later. A strict pull up for the sole purpose of building muscle can be performed differently to maximise muscle length in the eccentric phase and peak contraction in the concentric phase, but has limited real world application by comparison.

The strict pull up is performed without momentum through as full a range of motion as possible in order to preserve functional capacity in the long term. Shorter partial ranges may be employed for body building purposes, but in the absence of full range exercises and stretching, these abbreviated movements may lead to an inability to move the arm through full flexion (bringing the arms overhead) and risk of long term incapacity and injury.

The chin should pass over the horizontal plane of the bar and should be executed with the head in a neutral position, rather than craning the neck to reach with the chin.

The kipping pull up is a gymnastic movement and a very basic one at that. In fact, a kipping pull up is so basic to the competitive gymnast that it is not a scored element of any routine.

The kip differs from the strict pull up in that it specifically requires momentum to perform. This is where the internet trolls lose their minds: to them, momentum is tantamount to cheating and makes the movement purposeless. But is it? There is no such thing as free energy.

In the strict and kipping pull up, the energy required to move the mass of the athlete from the start position to the end position is the same. Otherwise it would violate the laws of conservation of energy. (This is high school physics and is the extent of my own understanding but I’m confident that in this context, the explanation is more than sufficient. I know that pull ups are performed in an open system, for instance – nonetheless, it applies equally to both variations).

      “The total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be conserved over time. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.” 

• Émilie du Châtelet

In the kipping pull up the athlete initiates the movement by rapidly transitioning through two distinct phases – the arch and the hollow.

The arch is considered the loading phase of the movement. The athlete hangs below the bar with legs tight together, gluteals squeezed to open the hip fully. The hip and legs are drawn behind the vertical plane of the bar by opening the distance from the pelvis to ribcage by contracting the spinal erectors and lengthening the abdominal muscles. The athlete also opens the shoulder joint to bring the upper body modestly in front of the vertical plane of the bar. This cancels out the horizontal movement of the lower body behind the bar – it is a pull ‘up’ after all and the introduction of horizontal movement is to be minimised. This process brings the athlete into an elongated arch shape of global extension.

In the arch, the pelvis and athlete’s centre of mass are as far away from the bar as possible. The front of the body is fully extended and the muscles and connective tissues are loaded storing elastic potential energy like a spring pulled outward.

Importantly, energy has not been magically created: it has been consciously shifted from stored ‘biochemical’ energy to stored ‘elastic’ potential energy – in line with what we know about the laws of thermodynamics.

The Hollow is considered the contractile phase of the movement. The athlete maintains their tissue tension in the lower body with legs tight together and glutes squeezed to open the hip fully but forcefully draws the hip and legs upwards by aggressively closing the distance from the pelvis to ribcage through the contraction of the abdominal muscles – which we call ‘compression’ of the midline. This brings the athlete into a contracted dish shape or hollow of global flexion. During this movement, the torso moves modestly behind the vertical plane of the bar in response to the horizontal movement of the lower body forward of the bar as the pelvis is raised and tucked.

In the execution of the hollow position, the athlete has significantly shortened the distance from the centre of mass to the bar and executed powerfully enough will generate a huge amount of vertical momentum (force = mass x acceleration) like a spring released to coil up again. Critically, this occurs before the elbows and shoulders close to bring the athlete toward the bar.

The vertical momentum propels the athlete upward, which they then assist by using the arms, pushing downward to carry this momentum on until the chin breaks the horizontal plane of the bar. If the force generated is only sufficient to carry the athlete to this point, a pull up is completed. The athlete decelerates at the bar before descending into the next rep, sustaining the hollow body position until the arms are fully extended and shoulders opened. The athlete will naturally fall into the hollow position from which the repetition can be cycled over, preserving momentum by transferring the stored ‘gravitational potential’ energy from their position over the bar once again, into stored elastic potential energy in the arch under the bar.

If a more powerful contraction occurs in the hollow, the athlete can sustain the acceleration vertically for longer and more complex movements like an uprise or bar muscle up can be performed from the same arch to hollow sequence.

While the absolute contribution of the upper body is reduced in the kipping pull up, the energy required to move the athlete to the position above the bar is the same. It’s the same mass, moving the same distance. We have effectively overcome the concept of kipping as cheating. In the kipping pull up, the force produced to perform the movement is distributed across both the upper body and the abdomen; in contrast to the strict pull up where the force is produced by the upper body alone.

The kipping pull up is neither cheating, nor is it inherently easier. The development of effective arch and hollow positions as well as the tensions, postures, sequencing and timing are difficult to master. I could perform strict pull ups long before I could perform anything approximating an efficient kipping pull up and this is not an experience unique to me.

Fundamentally, this depends on your personal aim. The strict pull up can be used to develop and maintain absolute strength in the upper body, postural and positional awareness, strength endurance and muscle mass. It should be a staple of training and is highly valuable to both novice and veteran athletes alike.

The main aim of the kipping pull up is to allow an athlete to progress to increasingly complex pulling gymnastics such as ring and bar muscle ups more efficiently but also carries a major side benefit of allowing more repetitions of the pull up to be produced per unit time. Because the limiting factor of the strict pull up – localised fatigue of the upper body musculature is reduced, the athlete can perform more volume, faster: which allows for the training of increased work capacity, with which CrossFit Training is principally concerned.

In any case, the strict pull up should be performed as a prerequisite to the kip and an athlete should have substantial capacity – a set of 10 disciplined repetitions will be more than sufficient to allow progress to more dynamic pulling movements. But the foundations of the arch and hollow can be introduced either hanging or even on the floor in instances where the athlete is entirely new to training (it has been our experience that even experienced athletes significantly benefit from drills on the floor).

In closing, we should now recognise that the online screeching of keyboard warriors is largely a product of misunderstanding the basic concept of the kip and its application outside of dedicated strength training. Risk is mitigated by the attention of both the trainer and the athlete to CrossFit’s Charter of Mechanics, Consistency, Intensity.

In order to be able to express your full potential as an athlete you should become proficient in both the kipping and strict pull up and to eliminate either would be to the overall detriment of the individual.

More information regarding CrossFit Training, CrossFit Glasgow and The Gymnastics Course can be found via these links:

CrossFit Training

CrossFit Glasgow

The Gymnastics Course

Gavin Heselton is one of the two owner operators of CrossFit Glasgow, a 16 year CrossFit Affiliate in Central Scotland