Bodyweight What’s the best way to improve pull ups and chin ups?

[Kev]

It actually gets better…

From Alpinist magazine…

In 1978, he moved 238 miles away from London to Llanberis in North Wales, a "village that has produced some of the greatest climbers in British climbing from Joe Brown onwards," Haston said. Today he lives on the island of Gozo, thirteen miles north of Malta where he first learned to climb. "I'm a Londoner. I'm a Cockney. I'm London scum," was one of the first things he told me. Haston is known for his bold routes on loose rock and his intense training regimen, which at one time consisted of 2,000 pull-ups and 3,000 push-ups a day. Although these days he rarely does such systematic training, every month he'll still whip out a big session of 1,000 to 1,500 pull-ups. We were there to talk about his love for the Utah desert.

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I’m assuming this man never needs help opening a jar of pickles. Or dare I say gherkins.

 

[Gypsyplumber]

Like others have said, you just have to do them. Make sure you understand the proper technique as well. I know many say “it’s just a pull up” yes it seems simple but are you using the tension throughout your entire body? Pull ups and chin ups utilize a lot of muscles not just the upper body. At one point I was doing them a lot along with many different pull up variations but now a days I only do them once a week 3 sets of 5 just so I don’t lose them. A few other exercises I found helpful for my chin ups are “headbangers” and simple dead hangs.

 

[Period]

This is true. At world class levels all bets are off as far as training goes. Especially in a comp setting on artificial walls.

Good old Stevie Haston comes to mind here as well. That cat would routinely crank out 1,000 pull-up days…

As a side note, following up on an article of Ethan Reeves on volume training for pull-ups - where he stated that one of his wrestlers did 600 reps in a few minutes over an hour - a couple of years ago I spontaneously tried to best this effort. I ended up with 600 reps (40 sets of 15, EMOM every 90 seconds) in 59 minutes and a couple of seconds. To quote Dan John, I'll do it again once I've recovered.
I learned a few things from that experience. There are some potentially unexpected aspects to training with very large volumes. One is that as you fatigue, other muscles will start to kick in. Not only did I get sore arms and lats, but also sore abs (that might be somewhat expected) and even sore pecs. Now, I'm not claiming the reps were pretty, I started using a moderate kip after 20 or 30 minutes, which may have contributed to this. My maximum effort was stuck at 45 reps in a single set back then, I rarely went over 100-120 reps / three sets per session, usually 20 to 30 minutes apart. I did zero pull-ups for a week afterwards. After that, supercompensation kicked in and my max suddenly jumped to 50 reps.
Bottom line of my anecdotical evidence: jumping into large volumes (especially in a short time frame) like I did isn't necessarily something I'd recommend. However, large volumes can have some unexpected benefits for sure.