# data[].attributes.body
2020. It was the middle of Covid, and I was sitting in my house bored out of my mind. Everything was closed, I couldn't go anywhere, and with a rainy day outside I concluded I had nothing better to do with my life than to go on Youtube and distract myself from the boredom that had been overtaking me. I remember coming across a video titled something along the lines up "10 movements that prove you aren't as strong as you think you are." Being an ego inflated 18 year old football player and track athlete I of course thought I was gonna have no problem proving this video wrong. I was quickly humbled when I discovered the muscle up.

The muscle up is an advanced upper body movement that combines a pull up and a dip together. The movement starts with an aggressive pulling motion to accelerate your body above the height of the pull up bar. You then are expected to immediately snap your arms in a powerful manner to get your wrists and elbows under you. From this position you must vertically push your entire body weight up until you reach a fully extended position at the top. This movement is not for everyone, and very quickly I found myself struggling with the strength and technical demands this movement required. I knew I had to practice and learn how to perform it.

Before being able to perform the muscle up, one must first possess the proper pushing and pulling strength. It is typically recommended an individual be able to perform 15 explosive pull ups and 15 powerful dips before attempting to practice any technique associated with the muscle up. I remember starting at a point of only being able to do 3 pull ups and 7 dips before my muscles would begin shaking miserably. This was my first learning challenge, as I had never performed these movements with such power or force before. This development of strength relates to Fitts and Posner's first stage of learning which is the cognitive stage. In the learning stage, a participant is tasked with learning the demands of the task and figuring out what works and what doesn't. This first stage of learning the amount of strength I needed and how to properly perform these movements (having a focus on powerful pulling and pushing) were key. I had to consiously think about how to pull and push my body in such a manner, and I also had to figure out what was good about my movements, and what I needed to change and improve.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
My mood when I finally mastered how to transition in the muscle up

# data[].attributes.body
The next step of the muscle up is learning how to smoothly transition from the pull up into the dip. This part of the movement requires significant amounts of kinesthetic information and awareness to know exactly when to snap your arms over. If you snap too early you are at a mechanical disadvantage and won't have enough momentum to properly transition. If you try to transition too late, your body will once again be in a mechancially disadvantaged position and because of how far away your wrist and elbow are from the bar, you won't be able to generate enough torque through these joints to snap your arms over. The three stages of information processing can help to explain how we can properly learn this transition stage.

The first stage is the stimulus identification stage. In this stage, you sense that a stimulus has occurred and identify what it is. In the case of the muscle up, this is the point where you identify that you have fully pulled your body up to the top of the bar. It is hard to explain but with enough practice you can literally identify how how much pulling tension is present in your back muscles and know it is time to transition. In addition, you must identify if your body position and grip is correct. If any of these are off by even a few centimeters, the transition will not occur properly.

The second stage is the response selection stage which is where you decide on an appropriate response to the stimulus. In the muscle up you must decide if you have enough momentum and mechanical advantage to perform the transition, or if you need to quickly bail out of it because they won't make the transition and risk injury. Similar to the first stage, this will be dependent on body position, grip, and even if the muscles have enough energy to withstand the transition.

The final stage is the Response programming stage. In this stage you prepare and initiate the response. This means organizing and sending the necessary commands down to the muscles to generate the movement. The commands can differ greatly depending on what information is provided from the second stage. Let's explore both scenarios. The first scenario is if the transition can't be performed. In this situation, you will need to bail. Bailing requires reversing every single motor command we built up to get to the transition point. During the bail, you must snap your wrists and elbows back into the pull up position, then generate eccentric strength through the back muscles to lower your body down in a controlled manner.

If you decide you have enough momentum to perform the transition, then you must aggressively snap your arms ahead of your body which will drive the shoulders and torso up above the bar. Then, you must activate and engage the muscles of the chest, triceps, shoulders, and stabilize through the core to generate a strong pushing movement to reach the top of the muscle up.

This transition phase is one of the most frustrating parts to learn. I will never forget the one day I stepped up to the bar didn't even have to think about where my body was, I just had failed so much that I finally mastered the timing and knew exactly when to snap and transition. After hundreds of failed attempts, I was so proud to had finally pulled the movement off.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
My nervous system when a nonlinear stimulus is applied. 

# data[].attributes.body
Once I was able to possess the proper strength and motor patterns necessary to perform the muscle up, the next step to improving and becoming even better at the movement is through refinement. A great concept that applies to this process is the dynamic pattern theory. This theory essentially states that we will self organize ourselves into a new pattern of motor behavior which usually happens through the refinement and improvement of motor patterns. This theory has three parts known as nonlinear behavior, order parameters, and control parameters.

Nonlinear parameters refer to the idea that movements aren't always predictable and that sometimes our body needs to be challenged in new ways to stimulate adaptation. This applies directly to the muscle up. In order to find the most effective technique, I had to play around with different ways of performing the exercise. One technique in particular that was extremely effective was the reverse muscle up where I started from the top position and had to slowly lower my body all the way down to the start position. This worked by helping me strengthen all the muscles used in the transition stage, as well as learning where my body should be located at different parts of the movement.

Order parameters are parameters that define the behavior of the system. This usually relates to being in phase (synchronous and coordinated movements) or anti-phase (non-synchronized). For the muscle up, I always want to be in phase because then the pulling and pushing movements are synchronized and occur at the same time, allowing for efficient movement.

The final part of the dynamic pattern theory is control parameters. These typically relate to variables that influence the stability of the control parameter. For the muscle up, pushing, pulling, and grip strength are all control parameters, as well as the explosiveness of these movements as they influence the speed of the movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Feeling like I can do anything in the weight room once I realized how well the muscle up transfers to other movement patterns. 

# data[].attributes.body
After finally mastering the muscle up and learning how to move my body in space, the final part of the journey was discovering how the skills I acquired in learning the muscle up transferred to other areas of my training. This is called transferability or transfer of learning which is defined as gain or loss of proficiency in one skill as the result of some other skill. Positive transfer occurs when the primary skill makes it easier to perform a separate skill, and negative transfer is when that primary skill makes it harder to learn a new skill.

For me, I experienced significant amounts of positive transfer to lot's of my other training movements. For starters, I greatly increased my ability to perform regular pull ups. Remember, when I started training and learning the muscle up I could only perform about 3 pull ups with proper form. However, after about a year and a half of using the muscle up in my routine I could perform around 22 pull ups in a row. In addition, I saw positive transfer to other movements like my bench press and shoulder press exercises as my muscles felt much more stable and strong performing these movements because of the way my muscle up training forced me to engage and train more of my synergist muscles.

Looking back now I am still amazed at how this skill that used to be so difficult for me I can now perform almost like it is second nature. It really reinforces how amazing the process of learning, practice, and refinement can lead to incredible feats in human performance.