Using body English or “kipping” is an essential part of some gymnastic and other athletic skills. Respected strength coach Randy Hauer observed: “I’ve come to respect [the kipping pullup] a lot...it is very athletic, gymnastic and I think has a great carryover to strict, dead hang pullups. I’m beginning to think this way about it: as the push press is to the press, the kipping pullup is to the strict pullup. We don’t call the push press “cheating”, it is its own exercise...I think the kipping pullup is its own exercise too...not a “cheating” pullup, but a high skill movement in its own right.”
Well put. When you get strong-ish at strict pullups—say, ten for ladies and twenty for gents—you may consider adding kipping pullups and more complex kipping maneuvers on a high bar to your repertoire. But not any sooner.
For a strong, experienced athlete kipping is its own skill; for a beginner or an intermediate it is cheating. Kipping is a skill to be used on top of one’s strength—not as a substitute for it.
To build on Randy’s analogy of the push press versus the strict military press, a beginner who push presses tends to destroy his fragile technique of the strict press and fails to develop the shoulder strength to get through the bottom half of the lift. His push press poundages will keep climbing while his strict press numbers will be standing still.
In contrast, small doses of the push press might help an experienced lifter overcome a plateau in the strict press. But push presses and jerks can never replace strict presses.
Until about fifty years ago the sport of Olympic weightlifting used to have a third event in addition to the snatch and the clean-and-jerk—the overhead press. Needless to say, athletes did a lot of pressing exercises in their training. Today’s weightlifters do a bare minimum. Their C&J numbers have gone way up—while their pressing strength has come down.
When Sergey, a world class Russian weightlifter with a 490-pound competition C&J max, finished a heavy training session, an old-timer asked him to humor him and test his seated military press. Sergey obliged and worked up to 253 pounds. Getting up from the bench he assured the older lifter that he would undoubtedly press 265 when fresh.
This is impressive—but around the time of the Moon landing it was not uncommon for a lifter with a 440-pound jerk (50 pounds lighter than Sergey’s) to do seated presses with 330 pounds (65 pounds more than Sergey).
That was a long way of saying that exercises relying on momentum, valuable as they are, do not replace strict ones.
An even stronger reason not to kip is safety. One’s shoulders and elbows must be ready to take repeated ballistic shock. It means two things.
First, you must own a great range of motion in your upper back and shoulders. If you look at a photo of a kipping athlete in the lowest position, you will notice that his or her arms are way behind the ears. This action is called “shoulder flexion.” Unless you can demonstrate this ROM while lying face down in a “Superman” posture, you have no business doing it in motion and at speed.
Second, your tendons and ligaments must be well-conditioned. Decades of Soviet coaching experience have taught us that the only way to do this is through thousands of full range reps over months and years.
This was a long way of saying: kipping is a choice to consider when you are already strong—not a substitute for strength.
