What’s Worse, Regular Kipping Pullups or Butterfly Kipping Pull-ups?

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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