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I’ve been on a major kipping pullup kick lately.  Another topic in the pullup world I wanted to touch on briefly (I promise I’ll stop talking about kipping soon) is the butterfly kipping pullup.  I know several people that won’t butterfly kip at all for fear of destroying their shoulders, and more specifically their labrum.

Is this really true though?  Is the kipping pullup a much safer variation then the butterfly pullup?  Will I tear my shoulder to shreds if I perform butterfly pullups?  Honestly I’m not sure.  I wanted to do some brainstorming and see if we can come up with some answers.

First things first, what is the butterfly pullup?  Who better to instruct you then Mr. Chris Spealler:

And some good old regular kipping pullups with Carl Paoli

I think the first question that comes to mind is, why the hell would I do either?  Well, you can obviously do more repetitions of kipping pullups then strict pullups.  On top of that, butterfly pullups are faster then kipping pullups.  When you put together a workout that requires a lot of pullups in a short period of time, the butterfly pullup fits the bill nicely.  So, it makes sense to be butterflying (one of my favorite past times).

The question I want to answer is which one is more stressful on the shoulder, specifically which one is more injurious to the labrum?  Great question.  First off, how do we injure the labrum in the first place?

Given the complete sparsity of research on shoulder injuries in the crossfit population, we’re just going to have to guess on this one (There is research on the mechanism of injury for other athletes though, so we can atleast draw some conclusions from that realm).  There are two ways in which …read more

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Regular paused squats are tough, but breathing paused squats take the pain – and the results – to the next level. …read more

So the last few articles were all trash talking on kipping pullups.  We went over several reasons why kipping pullups might be causing injuries.  If you missed these articles you can find them here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Now I wouldn’t be spewing so much pullup venom for no reason.  I actually enjoy kipping pullups.  I’m just very much interested in learning why kipping pullups cause injury so that we can learn how to make this exercise safer.  If you’re a competitive crossfitter or coach then you’re most likely interested as well.  So without further ado, 6 ways to make kipping pullups safer.

1. Build strength slowly

I love pullups, they’re a phenomenal exercise.  It used to be extremely impressive when you saw someone bang out 20 strict dead hang pullups.  Back in my personal training days I’d rejoice when I had a long time client finally completed their first pullup.  Now with the advent of crossfit you’ll regularly see workouts with 50+ pullups to be completed in a matter of minutes.   With these workouts comes the necessity of getting better at pullups, and FAST!  Enter the advent on kipping pullups, a way to complete more pullups in less time and finish those workouts faster.

However, because of the kipping action we may have skipped a step in the stages of learning how to do pullups properly.  We might be missing out on a key pillar, strength.

As we discussed in the first article, there are several reasons why performing kipping pullups before building prerequisite strength is bad.  If someone does not have the prerequisite strength to control the descent of their body from a pullup with bodyweight, then jumping into a kip may be inviting injury.

My favorite fix? Good old strength work.

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