Renaissance Fitness’s expert Personal Trainers, Ollie and Chris show you how to master the muscle up.

The muscle up is an impressive looking exercise and not only that, it is also great for building upper body strength. It allows you to train pretty much every upper body muscle in one movement from the wrists to lats, biceps, triceps, chest and shoulders.

Most people assume the muscle up is simply a dip and pull up, however it has quite a few other elements such as the false grip, muscle up transition which is an exercise in its own right and ring turn out.

Check out our video tutorial to find out what it takes.

As you can see from the video, the muscle up it is actually quite a complex and movement. When people come to our gym in Ledbury, many people try to jump straight into the movement and often wonder why they fail, giving us the bewildered puppy dog eyes look of “what did I do wrong or that’s impossible?”

When in reality it’s far easier than many advanced body-weight exercises such as the Planche, Front Lever, Human flag and Iron Cross to name a few.

However it is easy to say that when you’ve worked on an exercise for years to perfect it.

Don’t despair if you can’t do it after watching the video though, instead just remember it might take weeks or months to master it.

Just focus on improving your strength in the false grip position by performing false grip pull ups, work on building strength on ring dips and practise eccentric muscle ups to learn the correct movement pattern and you’ll have it mastered in no time.