In Episode 2 of Season 2 of the Performance Plus Podcast, Johnny and Pamela sit down to talk about butterfly pull-ups and why people hate them so much.
In this episode, we cover
Programs and articles mentioned in this episode:
Butterfly Pull-Up Training Program
Butterfly Pull-Ups For Beginners
Developing Butterfly Pull-Up Strength and Technique
Transcript
Johnny: Pamela, do you think butterfly pull ups are a valid form of pull up and should people pursue doing them?
Pamela: Okay, kind of a double edged store question. So butterfly pull ups are a functional way to add to intensity, to get from hanging to chin above or chest to the bar. Now, people love to hate them because people in CrossFit use them in the wrong way. It is not the foundation of a pull up. It is the advanced pull up, meaning when you go to your L one for CrossFit, it's mechanic consistency than intensity.
Butterfly pull-ups are the most way to bring intensity, meaning it's the fastest way to do a pull up. So I love them for achieving intensity, but if you do not have control of many strict slow and control. A good test is if you can do a 5 reps of a :03 tempo up and :03 tempo down. If you can't, you probably are jumping the gun and doing butterfly pull up way too early in your athletic career.
Johnny: I always think of them as a skill. Like a high level skill. It is the application of all this training that people are doing is to be able to apply this to a sport. It's a sport specific movement that allows you to be fast, like, to move quickly from, like you said, hanging to over the bar. And in other sports, people don't get crap for being their sports specific skills. Nobody gives gymnast crap for being able to do massive flips in the air on a floor routine or back walkovers on a balance beam. Those are sports specific skills that are built by doing lots of foundational movements. Why is it that everybody hates the butterfly pull up and CrossFit?
Pamela: Well, one, people look like flopping fishes because they're not strong enough to do it correctly, so it gives it a bad name. And you're right. Gymnasts do giants on bars. That's a swinging movement, right. So that's a skill specific swing. So this is a swinging movement skill specific to our sport. People don't understand the CrossFit as a sport. And I honestly have to say that a lot of people in the everyday CrossFit class setting kind of don't understand it either. It's been lost in translation since 2005.If you look back the old CrossFit Journal videos you will see Nicole Carroll doing Nasty Girls with strict ring muscle ups.
Every sport evolves. Look at gymnastics in the 1940s versus the 1970s versus 2020, right. It's evolving. Our sport has evolved, but our mentality of why it's evolving, too many have not caught up. Okay, so when I started in 2011 and I was asking you to do a rain muscle up, it was tricks. It wasn't even, like, an option. I didn't learn tipping until probably a year and a half into process. So, yeah, it's evolved, and we just have to understand why it's evolving. And as athletes get better, we want to be more intense, but we also have to have them. Yeah. And I think that's the people want to mimic the people that they admire, I guess. I want to go to the gym. I want to look like Risk Ronnie when I'm on the pull up bar. But the reality is I'm probably not strong enough to be doing t