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11 Spicy Ring Muscle Up Workouts to Improve Your Bodyweight Skills

Test yourself with these challenging workouts.

Ring muscle up workouts crop up regularly in CrossFit. Muscle ups are an advanced bodyweight gymnastics skill and one dedicated athletes spend countless hours on trying to perfect.

They require specific training, dedication, and persistence and are a fantastic display of strength, coordination, and skill.

The ring muscle-up will see you transition from a hanging position below the rings to a supported position, arms extended and locked, above the rings. The exercise combines a pull-up and a dip.

As a functional movement, the ring muscle up will allow you to get up onto/over any object on which you can get a finger hold.

Improve your ring muscle-up efficiency

  1. Develop or train your false grip – to see improvements in your false grip, you should train it like you train any of your major lifts. Take the time to work on this individual part of the muscle-up. The reason the false grip is so important is because it puts your wrist in an optimal position to allow the ‘turnover’ to take place and get you about the rings. The false grip is your biggest weapon in getting your first ring muscle-up, but also making that big jump from 10 to 20+ ring muscle-ups.
  2. Practice the transition – transitions are the link between the pull-up and the dip. The best way to practice transitions is to do them, so get the reps in and develop muscle memory for the ring muscle-up. Floor transitions, box transitions and banded ring pull-downs are all great to train for the coordination and speed required to make the transition successful.
  3. Practice, practice, practice – by keeping practicing you’ll make consistent progress. Attempt strict muscle-ups, kipping muscle-ups, add accessory work to your training. Constantly try ring muscle-ups out and don’t let yourself rust.

Read more: How to Get Your First Ring Muscle Up

Improve your mental and physical strength with these ring muscle up workouts.

RING MUSCLE UP WORKOUTS

1. Double Trouble

EMOM for As Long As Possible

  • 3 Muscle-Ups
  • 5 Shoulder-to-Overheads (135/95 lb)*

*Add one rep every minute.

At the start of the clock, you have a 1 min window to complete the tree muscle-ups and the reps of shoulder-to-overheads (starting with 5), if you complete the given amount of reps in the minute, then you add 1 rep to the shoulder-to-overhead in the next minute.

Your score is the total reps you completed in the entire workout.

These movement combined are deadly – you’ll find yourself fighting physically and mentally to advance to the next round throughout the workout.

This workout is meant to test your shoulder endurance with high skill level gymnastics, along with some barbell cycling. Ideally, we will be able to get 7+ minutes in, so make sure to scale accordingly.

2. Muscle-Up Complex

Every 2:30 Minutes for 20 Minutes:

  • 1 Strict Muscle-Up
  • 2 Kipping Muscle-Ups
  • 3 Ring Dips

Total of 8 rounds.

This is a hard sequence as you start with strict work. This is a complex, so perform the set unbroken, without letting go of the rings.

For the strict ring muscle-up, lean back and maintain a strong hollow position. For the kipping muscle-ups, keep your body as long as possible and look up throughout the transition.

3. Hero WOD James Prosser

For Time:

  • 100 Muscle-Ups

No many other workouts will require you to perform 100 ring muscle-ups.

It’s a good idea to come up with a strategy before attempting this workout. Think how you’d like to partition the reps to keep you moving efficiently and resting as little as possible.

crossfitter ring muscle-up workouts

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