Maintenance & Specialty Programs

I keep reading that when doing a speciality program one should just do maintenance for other body parts. I realize this may be a stupid question, but what’s maintenace? I understand the thoery, but what should I actually be doing in the weight room?

The program I want to do is Thib’s Keep Your Chin Up. I can only manage one chin at the moment, and that’s just not acceptable. All he says about other training is not to do additional upper back work.

Thanks for any advice.

If you’re a beginner, you don’t need to be doing any kind of specialization program. You’re most likely weak all over, not just in the chin-up. If you do chins in every session, as many as you can crank out rest-pause style, that should help. For instance, do a chin, rest for as long as you need to be able to do another, then do another…etc. If you can get two in a set, do two. Eventually you’ll be able to do multiple chins in a set.

What the above dude suggested is called ‘Grease the groove’. Basically, it’s 2 sets of 5 of an excersice every time you lift. Work up to two sets of five. I’d say do rest-pause to 5, then work up from there i.e. do two, rest pause and crank out more until you can do 2x5.

I was planning to do 10x3 for fat loss after I was comfortable with chins. Should I just stick chins (at this point a chin and negatives) before everything else, or should I try a different program? I’ve already done two rounds of TBT and enjoyed it, but I’d like to try something new.

[quote]OneEye wrote:
If you do chins in every session, as many as you can crank out rest-pause style, that should help. For instance, do a chin, rest for as long as you need to be able to do another, then do another…etc. If you can get two in a set, do two. Eventually you’ll be able to do multiple chins in a set.[/quote]

I ended up doing this and BBB, and it worked. I cranked out a set of 7 chins yesterday! Thanks!