Chin-ups are for children

Alexeyev breathed deeply as he gazed upon the room. He said, “I have done it with my own hands. I have a talent for carpentry. I have clever hands–I have what peasants used to call ‘hands of gold.’ I have laid the bricks in much of the courtyard walls. I have cleaned stones for my garden. I have built stools and tables here. I have built this room.”

At the rear of the building is a gazebo that Alexeyev also built with his golden hands. It contains a Ping-Pong table and a chinning bar. Asked if he used the chinning bar in his training, he looked surprised and scoffed, “Nvet. It is for the children, but even they are too wise to use it.”

For those of you that don’t know, Alexeyev was one of the greatest Olympic weightlifters of all time — a fact that made this little passage even harder for me to swallow. Why would one of the greatest weightlifters of all time be shaming chin-ups and pull-ups?

Is the exercise useless? Should I even be doing it?

I thought about those questions quite some time ago. I probably even stopped doing chin-ups/pull-ups. Guess I didn’t understand context.

Everyone has an end goal. Before you consider whether or not to take any sort of advice, you first have to decide if their end is your end. If it isn’t, beware — even if they are one of the “greats.” 

I’m sure a lot of gymnasts can look at a barbell and say, “Nvet.”

That’s fine.

The problems arise when someone that wants to be an Olympic weightlifter says “nvet” to a barbell, and when someone that wants to be a gymnast says “nvet” to the chin-up bar.

Of course, that sentence above looks silly. Who would do such a thing? Yet these cultural-context problems are more common than you’d think. It’s why people don’t do curls, even though they want big arms. It’s why people don’t do ab exercises, even though they want a six-pack. It’s why people squat until their eyes bleed, even though they want to be more athletic.

Be careful of what you say “nvet” to.