How to do a proper pull up with full range

A complete pull up has two ends that people love to skip. The bottom is a true dead hang: arms fully straight, shoulders relaxed but not shrugged up to your ears, hanging under your own weight. The top is your collarbone or upper chest close to the bar, not just your chin barely clearing it. Everything between those two points is the range you should own.

Cutting the range short is tempting because the bottom of a pull up, breaking away from a full hang, is the hardest part, and the very top is where you run out of steam. But those hard portions are exactly where you build strength. Research comparing full and partial range training generally finds that training a fuller range of motion produces at least as much, and often more, muscle and strength than short reps. When you skip the bottom of your pull up, you skip some of the best of it.

A pull up uses an overhand grip, palms facing away from you, roughly shoulder to slightly wider than shoulder width. That grip biases your lats and upper back. Here is the rep done properly.

1. Start in a dead hang. Hang from the bar with straight arms. Grip hard. Let your shoulders be long, but keep enough tension that you are ready to pull, not slumped.
2. Set your shoulder blades first. Before your arms bend, pull your shoulder blades down and back, as if tucking them into your back pockets. This scapular set switches on your lats and keeps your shoulders safe. It is the step almost everyone skips.
3. Pull your elbows down toward your ribs. Drive your elbows down and slightly back, leading with the elbows rather than yanking with your hands. Imagine pulling the bar down to you rather than dragging yourself up to it.
4. Finish with your chest near the bar. Aim to bring your upper chest toward the bar and keep your body from swinging. A slight arch and chest-up finish is fine, a full-body kip is not.
5. Lower all the way down under control. Reverse the movement slowly until your arms are straight and you are back in a full dead hang. Do not just drop. The lowering phase builds a lot of strength.

Most people cannot do a full-range pull up on day one, and that is completely normal. The mistake is trying to grind out ugly half reps with a kip. Instead, build the pieces. These progressions develop the exact strength a real pull up needs, in the full range, so the first rep you get is a good one.

A shoulder-width to slightly wider overhand grip is a sensible default. Going extremely wide shortens your range and stresses your shoulders without a clear payoff, so resist the temptation to spread your hands out to look impressive. If your shoulders bother you at a wide grip, bring your hands in.

If a bare bar hurts your wrists or shoulders, a neutral grip, palms facing each other on parallel handles, is often more comfortable and still trains the back hard. And a chin up, palms facing you, is a close cousin that brings in more biceps. None of these are cheating. They are simply different flavours of the same vertical pull, and rotating between them keeps your shoulders happy while still hitting your back.

Pull ups respond to the same rules as any lift: give them regular, progressive work. If you can do a few, train them two or three times a week with several sets, stopping a rep or two before your form falls apart. Add reps, then add sets, and once bodyweight sets feel easy, add load with a dip belt or a dumbbell held between your feet.

If you cannot do one yet, spend the same slots on the progressions above: dead hangs, scapular pulls, negatives, and assisted reps. Keep the reps clean and full range, be patient, and the strength accumulates. People routinely go from zero to a genuine pull up in a couple of months of consistent, honest work.