Chin-ups - Grease the Groove

[rasmusDoh]

Hey

So i wanna get better at chin-ups and was suggested Grease the Groove.
With better i mean get my total BW rep max up, but more importantly i wanna be able to use chin-ups as a "real" strength exercise - so with added weight at some point.
Bought a chin-up bar last week, set it up in my room, and started doing some everyday.

The thing is, i can only do almost 3 deadhangs. First two are good, third i get like 75% up.

Grease the Groove suggests you do a lot of non-failure sets.
But this is where i'm in doubt: is this sets of 1 or 2 reps for me? I don't feel like i'm all used up after a set of two.

Saturday i did three sets of 2 and three sets of 1. Then i read you have to do like 50% of your max set rep - so did 10 sets of 1 yesterday instead.

What would you suggest i do?


Thanks

[Chebass88]

Easy. Do as many as you can, as often as you can.

[BarbellJunkie]

General rule - don't do any grinders. So long as you're flying up fast do as many as you can each time you walk passed the bar.*

*some people can get dicky elbows from doing chins all day err' day. So work your way into it and ease back if things start feeling funny.

[rasmusDoh]

Alright, i'll up it to sets of 2 several times a day.

But, if i'm not supposed to do grinders, how will i know when to proceed to doing sets of 3? And so on..
Should i test it every morning on my first set (like today)?

EDIT: Just did another set. I'll say that rep 2 is a bit tough on the last part - but i made it.

[selters]

When two reps is easy, you do three. Or get comfortable with two reps with 2.5-5 lbs added weight first.

[yorick]

I believe the general rule of thumb is, "Leave a rep or two in the tank." So going on the easy side by only doing sets of 1 isn't going to hurt you if you feel that rep 2 feels a little tough.

Slow and easy progress is better than hurting yourself or burning out too quickly.

You could probably just test to see where your "one or two left in the tank" point is every week.

[DV]

My brother used this to good effect, though he could do a few more than you. I'd start doing 3-4 sets of 1 rep, working up to 6-7 sets. Spread out over the day. Maybe spend a week working up to this. Then I'd start adding a rep to some of the sets, until you are up to 7 sets of 2 per day. This would maybe take an additional week or two. Then from there spend some weeks going up to 3 reps and so on and so forth. As some have noticed you can get elbow issues from this, but if you are careful in slowly upping the dose it shouldn't be much of an issue.

I find that weighted chins have good carryover to max rep chins. So maybe do a workout or two a week with 2-3 reps of heavy weighted chins, once you are hitting 7-8 reps with BW.

My brother did grease the groove push-ups as well, and they seemed to work well as well, possibly feeding progress on chins. So that is something to consider, too.

[rasmusDoh]

I won't say 2 reps is easy, but it doesn't kill me.

Following what DV said, i already did 8 sets of 1 and 1 set of 2 yesterday. So guess that means i should move on to trying to get 7 sets of 2.
Have done 3 sets of 2 today - guess i'll go for some sets of 1, maybe one more set of 2 if i feel fresh later tonight.
No elbow pain or general fatigue so far, so guess it's alright?

Since i can only do 2, it's hard to find my "one or two left in the tank" point. But got almost one left in the tank when doing 2, so until i can do more is that okay?

Gotta make progress in some way and DV's method seems to do that in a nice way.

[yorick]

DV's method will work. Don't overthink it. And don't feel like you gotta be greedy about the gains. They will come. Your body will adapt and pretty soon you'll be doing sets of 5.

[DV]

Cheers. I mistyped about weighted chins, though. I meant 2-3 SETS not reps. But that's quite in the future in this particular case anyway.