Coaching the Kipping Muscle-Up With Jeff Tucker

CrossFit Gymnastics coach Jeff Tucker shared his expertise at the 2011 Summer Affiliate Gathering in Big Sky, Mont. In this video, he instructs an athlete on the kipping muscle-up to help refine her movement.

“What I look at as a coach are angles. If you’re creating angles and popping the hip in the movement, I’m wondering if we have a strength issue here,” he says.

Tucker has the athlete use her swing on the kipping pull-up and cues her to keep pulling. He says the rings are similar to the bar.

“The beauty is these get to move with your body,” Tucker says of the rings. “Give me a good swing and then make sure to keep pulling so that they’re underneath the armpit as you finish.”

Next, he dials in her kipping swing then has the athlete perform a muscle-up progression kneeling under low rings to scale the movement with her knees. He instructs her to keep her hands at her sides as she presses in the dip.

To develop dip strength, Tucker recommends strict dips on a static plane, weighted strict dips on a static plane, and then working the dynamic plane with dips and weighted dips using the low-rings progression. The key is to use these activities as skills work, not as part of a WOD.

“With proper rest, the goal is to do the last one better than the first one,” Tucker says.

7min 17sec

Additional reading: The Muscle-Up by Greg Glassman, published Nov. 1, 2002.