Gironda Sternum Chins
Also works: Biceps · Middle Back
Vince Gironda's chin-up: an underhand grip, the spine arched hard, the head thrown back, and the body leaning until it finishes near horizontal with the sternum touching the bar. It trades vertical height for a huge arc of shoulder extension, and it asks a great deal of your thoracic spine.
Own the movement
Set up first, then execute. Every cue below is something you can check on your next set.
Before the first rep
- Take a shoulder-width underhand grip on the bar, thumbs wrapped, hands no wider than your shoulders.
- Hang with the arms fully straight and the shoulder blades allowed to rise before you brace.
- Squeeze the glutes and keep the legs together and slightly forward — they act as a counterweight for the lean.
- Only attempt this once you can do eight strict dead-hang chin-ups. Below that, the lean is a way to shorten the rep, not lengthen it.
- Set the bar high enough that your body can reach horizontal without your heels touching the floor.
Every rep
Breathing & tempo — Exhale hard through the pull and the lean, inhale on the way down. Explosive but controlled up, one second held at the sternum, three seconds down.
Before you load it
- Stop the set the moment the arch comes from your lower back rather than your upper back. Repeated lumbar extension under a hanging load is the injury this movement actually causes.
- If you have a history of shoulder impingement or a labral problem, the deep extended finish is likely to aggravate it. Regular chin-ups give most of the benefit without that position.
Sets, reps & load
Where to start, and what to change when it stops being hard.
Bodyweight only for a long time. The limiter is rarely pulling strength — it is upper-back extension and shoulder tolerance, and neither improves by hanging a plate off you. Once you can do three sets of eight with the sternum genuinely touching and a controlled three-second descent, add 5 kg on a belt and drop back to sets of five.
What goes wrong
The errors that show up most often, and the cue that fixes each one.
Ribs down, brace the abs, and let the lean come from your upper back only. If you cannot get there, cut the lean to 30 degrees and spend a month on thoracic extension over a foam roller before pushing further.
Film one set from the side. The elbows must finish behind the torso; if they are still under it when the bar touches, you have angled your body rather than pulled it.
Keep the legs together and quiet, glutes squeezed. If the reps only happen with a leg drive, do strict chin-ups for six weeks and come back.
Lower under control across three seconds and return the torso to vertical before the elbows finish straightening. The stretched, extended shoulder is the position you least want to fall into.
Why bother
An ordinary chin-up stops when your chin clears the bar, and at that point the upper arm has been driven down to roughly your sides. Leaning back and continuing until the sternum touches drives the elbows well behind the torso, into shoulder extension the lats and lower traps only reach at the very end of their range. That is territory a vertical chin-up never visits.
The cost is honest. To finish with your hips at about 45 degrees and your head parallel to the floor, you extend the thoracic spine aggressively and load the shoulder in a stretched, extended position. If your upper back is stiff, the lumbar spine will supply the arch instead, and that is where people hurt themselves on this movement.
Where it fits
Treat it as an accessory, not the day's main pull. Five to eight strict reps, first movement after warm-up while your grip and upper back are fresh, once a week. Do it after strict chin-ups and it becomes a form-degrading grind; do it instead of them once a week and you get the lower-range work without the wear.
If this one isn't it
No kit, too hard, or too easy — here's where to go instead.
Same job, different kit
Start here instead
When this gets easy
Asked and answered
Do I really need to touch my sternum to the bar?
That is the standard the movement is named for, but it is a target rather than a rule. Touching with the upper chest and the elbows behind your ribs already gets you the range that makes this different from a chin-up. Faking the contact by throwing your head back harder gets you nothing.
Is throwing my head back safe?
For a healthy neck under bodyweight, briefly, yes — it is the natural consequence of extending the thoracic spine. Do not force it with the neck muscles, and skip the movement entirely if you have neck pain or a cervical disc history. The head follows the upper back; it should never lead.
Overhand or underhand grip?
Underhand, shoulder-width, as Gironda specified. The supinated grip lets the elbows travel behind the torso far more easily, which is the entire point. An overhand version exists but reaches noticeably less shoulder extension for the same effort.
Will this build a wider back than normal chin-ups?
Width comes from lat size, and lat size comes from load and volume accumulated over months — not from an exercise that makes the pull feel novel. What sternum chins genuinely add is range at the shortest end of the lat, which a vertical chin-up never reaches. That earns it a slot once a week. It does not earn it the shape claims Gironda made for it.