Horizontal Bar Exercises For Building Strength

Exercises on the horizontal bar can help you develop most muscle groups, such as the lats, biceps, deltoid, press, hands - grip strength, arms, trapezoidal, and back muscles. Also, they are effective in building pecs muscles too. Their accessibility gives the easiness of horizontal bar exercises. Thus if you have no time or money to go to a gym, you can improvise it at home and start building muscles with success.

Exercises to the bar belong to the bodyweight exercises group and have a low risk of injury if you follow basic safety precautions. If you have never trained at the bar, then you maybe ask yourself how to learn to do these exercises. Nothing is complicated; grip the bar and try to pull up. Be persistent, do daily strength training, and after a few weeks, you can do full pull-ups.

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Since the bar can rub your bar, it is advisable to buy gloves for these exercises. You can make them from leather or other material. The most important thing is to wear them every time you do activities at the bar. Once you do pull-ups, be aware you will not get fast results.

So, be patient and do them with dedication every time. Along with this, all the time, follow the proper technique of execution. Grip the bar, and then slowly and evenly pull up your body. The tempo of these exercises should be slow, with no thrusts.

Before turning to complex exercises on the bar, you should thoroughly master pulling with both hands. It is an essential exercise everybody should perform correctly and thoroughly, and only then is time to go for more exercises on the bar.

To perform pull-ups correctly, you have to determine your goal - to increase strength or build muscle mass. Pull-ups are composed of two phases - positive and negative. The positive phase is when you pull up, and the negative is when you lower your body. To increase muscle strength and endurance, you must slowly pull up your body and drop it quickly. So, you put more accent on the positive phase.

The negative phase is fastly pulling up your body and lowering it slowly. In this case, muscles get increased volume. To build strength and power mass, you must keep your muscles in tension during all movement.

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Besides negative/positive movements, considerable importance also has the type of grip. Each of these grips puts more load on a specific group of muscles. People use pull-ups for building shoulders and lats muscles, while chin-ups develop bicep muscles.

When pulling with both hands as the basis of any activities on the bar is mastered, you can move on to more complex exercises, like in every training system. An excellent strength exercise on the horizontal bar is a bit more complicated. For its performance, one hand gripped the flat bar, and the other one the vertical bar.

The lower you make the vertical grip, the harder it would be to pull up your body. Gradually increase the number of repetitions until you get to ten or fifteen. This exercise is very effective for strengthening back muscles.

Another variation of standard pull-ups is wide grip pull-ups. It is a complicated exercise and requires long practice. It has excellent effects on breast muscles,  which exceed all your expectations. To do it, you have to grasp the bar in a wide grip.

When pulling up, try touching the crossbar with your chest, relaxed biceps, and most butted blades. This exercise is on the bar for the back muscles and shoulder girdle. Also, it works with trapezoidal and lats groups of muscles.

A more complicated version of pull-ups is pull-ups behind your neck. This exercise has a high risk of injury, but if you manage to perform it properly, you can successfully train the lats, trapezoidal, round, and infraspinatus groups of muscles. When doing it, make sure your body is strictly perpendicular to the ground.

If you want to increase your biceps, you can do a close grip chin-up. You can choose to be assisted when doing this exercise if you feel not ready enough to do it. When doing it, you have to handle biceps contracting and not pull with the back. Also, it would be best if you kept your hands extended at the bottom and not balanced your body.

For building triceps, muscles perfectly work pull-ups with a neutral grip. Grasp the bar as one fist was over the other. Pull up your body, turning your head to left or right at the bar level. Try to change the hand's position between sets.

Read More: Pull-Ups Exercises

Exercises on the horizontal bar are efficient for building press muscles too. You can work abdomen muscles by raising the legs. This is quite a difficult exercise for beginners, since there is no support for the back, and do properly from the technical point of view is quite tricky. That's why it's much easier to use a wall bar that provides you with support for your back.

This exercise is mandatory not to allow your legs and torso to swing since it takes away the correct load on the press, and the routine becomes useless. The legs should be quickly and very slowly lowered. Namely, the slow rise of legs involves the work of lower press muscles.

You can hook your legs on the bar to strengthen your upper abdomen muscles and twist your body. The significant disadvantages of this exercise are that it is hard to do, uncomfortable, and risky. As you see, a horizontal bar is an excellent tool for building and strengthening muscle mass.

It is straightforward for standard pull-ups and can be an excellent alternative for your workout diversification. Once you gain experience, you can try another more complicated pull-up for great results. But the most important thing is to include a horizontal bar in your workout routine, following the proper execution.

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