Ring Pull-Ups: The Best Advanced Calisthenics Back Exercise

This exercise is a great way to develop your upper body strength, particularly your back, shoulders, and arms. You also engage your core and stabilizer muscles due to the instability of the rings.

Let’s see how you can master this advanced gymnastics move to build stronger shoulders, a stable core, and jacked arms. 

We’ll walk through how to perform ring pull-ups, what muscles are engaged in this exercise, and what progressions you can use to work up to this challenging pull-up variation, enhancing your workout routine. 

How to Do Ring Pull-Ups

The pull-up, in any form, is one of the most efficient total body exercises to add to your pull day workout. 

Here’s how you can get your first ring pull-ups. Remember, this is a highly advanced variation that many calisthenics enthusiasts and gymnasts still struggle with! So, don’t push yourself to do it, especially if you are a beginner. 

Set-Up

Adjust the rings to a height where you can hang them with straight arms.

Hold the rings with your palms facing either away from you (pronated grip) or toward you (supinated grip), depending on your preference. 

Starting Position

Hang from the rings with your arms extended overhead and your body in a straight line. Think about bracing your core to keep your body stable.

Pulling Up

Start your pull-up by drawing your shoulder blades down and back, engaging your lats (latissimus dorsi).

Pull your chest towards the rings, keeping your elbows close to your sides.

As you pull up, let the rings rotate naturally. Your palms may turn to face each other (neutral grip) at the top of the movement.

Top Position

At the top of the pull-up, keep your chin above the rings. Pause briefly, tensing your muscles to use more core strength.

Lowering Down

Now, slowly lower yourself back to the starting position with control, fully extending your arms. Don’t “drop” into your shoulders. Instead, make sure you control the movement; don’t let the rings control you!

Reps

To start, aim for 1 set of 8 clean reps. Depending on your strength level, you can scale this move up, working towards a standard set pattern of 3-4 sets of 6-12 reps. 

Pro-Tip: Make sure to work at the proper level for your abilities. We don't recommend working on ring pull-ups until you can comfortably execute at least 3-4 sets of 10 reps each of strict pull-ups. If you’re newer in your fitness journey, pull-up alternatives can be a great way to get you thinking about how to drive from your lats and where to move your shoulder blades. 

Benefits of Ring Pull-Ups

Like all other exercises, ring pull-ups also have benefits for your body. Let’s list them: 

Better Balance

Because rings are unstable, they force your stabilizer muscles to work overtime, especially your shoulders and core. These muscles do most of the moving and work harder to keep you balanced during an unstable movement.

Joint Health

Using rings gives you more natural wrist, elbow, and shoulder movement. This can help decrease strain or shoulder pain and make your pull-ups a more joint-friendly move than they’d be using a traditional pull-up bar. 

Better Range of Motion

Because they’re not in a fixed place, rings help you move more freely. 

Yes, this can be scary! 

At first, it will feel like you’re a little off-kilter. That being said, working on your pull-ups with rings allows for deeper muscle contraction and stretch. This can be a better way to help you strengthen and grow your muscles if you’re at an advanced fitness level. 

For those who are no strangers to the gym game and have been at it for years, the incremental gains you make can feel like a tough slog. 

Compared to the “newbie gains” that we often see— rapid muscle gain, strength gain, or weight loss in people new to working out— intermediate or advanced athletes can feel stagnant. 

This is because your muscles constantly adapt to the work you do. If you want to see growth at an advanced level, you need a higher degree of stimulus. 

If you want to focus on maximizing muscle hypertrophy to continue buil your body, an extremely challenging move like the ring pull-up can be an excellent way to level up. 

Versatility

Typically, you can adjust your rings to sit at different heights. This lets you modify the workout for your height and strength level. For example, you can work on assisted pull-ups by lowering the rings or increase your challenge with ring muscle-up progressions (a pull-up to dip variation). 

Core Strength

Finally, ring pull-ups are all about the abs! 

Although to the untrained eye, they seem like an arm exercise, this move requires significant core work to keep your body position stable. 

The less stable you are in space and the more you swing around, the harder you make this move for yourself. It seems counterintuitive, but moving through your pull-ups in a straight up-and-down pattern is actually easier than swinging and flailing around to get your body up. 

This assumes you have the strength to perform full pull-ups, of course. If not, a similar exercise like chin-ups for biceps makes a more accessible variation. 

But once you build back and core strength, ring pull-ups are a fantastic full-body exercise to build up the abs.

Ring Pull-Ups— Muscles Worked

Do pull-ups work abs? 

Ring pull-up is a compound exercise. This workout certainly works a whole lot more! 

Here are the muscles that power your movement when you do a ring pull-up. 

Ring pull-ups, like traditional pull-ups, target multiple muscles in the upper body, but they work more by way of stabilizing muscles since rings are unstable.

 Here's a detailed look at the muscles worked during ring pull-ups:

Main Muscles 

1. Latissimus Dorsi (Lats)

Your lats are the main drivers of your pull-ups. These muscles are responsible for pulling your arms down and back, which lifts your body up towards the rings.

2. Biceps Brachii

Your biceps brachii, usually just called biceps, are the muscles on the front of your upper arms. Biceps are responsible for flexing your elbows so you can pull your body up to the rings.

3. Rhomboids

These smaller muscles sit between your shoulder blades. They help you to retract the scapulae (shoulder blades) during the pull, giving you stability and helping in the upward motion.

4. Trapezius (Lower and Middle)

Your lower and mid trapezius (traps) stabilize your shoulder blades and help move your arms during a pull-up.

Secondary Muscles

Here are some muscles that play a supporting role during ring pull-ups and most pull-up variations. 

1. Deltoids (Rear)

Your rear deltoids, the muscles at the back of your shoulders, keep your shoulder joints stable and engaged during your pulling motion, especially when the rings rotate.

2. Infraspinatus and Teres Major

These rotator cuff muscles help keep your shoulder joints in place and help with your upper arm movement. 

3. Brachialis and Brachioradialis

The brachialis and brachioradialis muscles on your upper arms and forearms help flex your elbows and pull your body upwards.

4. Pectoralis Major (Chest)

The chest muscles, also known as pectorals or pecs, especially the upper part, help you move your arms during ring pull-ups. 

Stabilizing Muscles

Compared to a regular pull-up, ring pull-ups require your body to stay much more stable! These muscles provide a subtle but essential contribution to your pull-ups. 

1. Core Muscles

Your core muscles, like the rectus abdominis (six-pack), obliques, and transverse abdominis, keep your body stable and stop you from swinging since the rings are unstable.

2. Forearms and Grip Muscles

Your forearms work harder to keep a strong grip on a set of rings than they would with a fixed bar. This builds your grip strength and forearm endurance over time. These muscles can be tricky to build. Here’s a quick guide to understanding the forearm muscles and a potential handy hack you can use to make these muscles stronger: Do Hand Grippers Work. 

3. Erector Spinae

These muscles along your spine help keep your posture neutral and upright. They also stabilize your lower back. Since this area is highly susceptible to injuries in most people, the erector sipnae has an important job to do!

It’s important to keep your lower back strong, not just for ring pull-ups but for other workouts too. For example, many people experience lower back pain when squatting.

If you’re training on the ground and haven’t yet soared to the height of ring pull-ups, be sure to work on mid back exercises and cable back workouts to strengthen your erector spinae. 

Back isolation exercises are a good way to do this if you want to target a specific part of the back, too!

4. Rotator Cuff Muscles

Finally, your rotator cuff muscles (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis) are more engaged during ring pull-ups since you need to stabilize the shoulder joint as the rings move.

That’s a lot of muscles at work! 

To sum it up, ring pull-ups work for the same key muscle groups as traditional pull-ups, like the lats, biceps, rhomboids, and trapezius muscles. 

However, they also engage more stabilizing muscles, especially those in your shoulders, core, and forearms, to work around the rings’ instability. This makes ring pull-ups the perfect exercise to help you build upper body strength, muscle coordination, and overall stability.

Let’s see what makes ring pull-ups so different— and so much harder to ace!— compared to standard pull-ups.

Differences from Traditional Pull-Ups

What makes a ring pull-up different and more difficult than a regular pull-up? There are several factors that increase the difficulty of ring pull-ups. 

Stability

When you do standard pull-ups, you typically use a fixed pull-up bar or a set of handles. This offers stability since whatever apparatus you use stays completely still. 

Ring pull-ups, on the other hand, force you to do the stability work. Since rings can swing in midair, they’re entirely reliant on your muscular strength to hold them in place as you work. 

This mostly comes from using your core stabilizer muscles to make micro-adjustments to your position in space so you stay on balance as you do your pull-ups. 

Grip 

Ring pull-ups let you to vary your grip more fluidly compared to standard pull-ups. They can even be a type of neutral grip pull-up where your hands face toward one another. 

This grip transition during your movement can be easier on your joints vs. the fixed grip of a bar.

Muscle Activation

Because using a set of rings throws off your balance, you engage more stabilizing muscles to keep yourself balanced, especially in the shoulders, core, and forearms. Working all these muscles at once is a great full-body workout if you’re able to do it successfully.

Range of Motion

Back to this benefit, the range of motion that ring pull-ups offer allows for deeper muscle engagement, which can lead you to gain more strength in the long term.

Big Picture 

To conclude, if you’ve pulled yourself to your max with traditional pull-ups and are ready for a new challenge, ring pull-ups may be right up your alley. 

This advanced pull-up variation uses hanging gymnastics rings that are suspended in the air from loose straps. Unlike a pull-up bar that you’re probably used to using, these rings don’t sit in a stable, fixed position— they swing and wobble to and fro! 

This means you’ll have to work HARD to keep your core stable enough to stay supported as you pull your way up. 

Not only will you have to use the muscle that you work in a traditional pull-up— your lats (back), biceps, shoulders, chest and core— this move will be even tougher on areas like your forearms and lower back to help you balance while suspended. 

Remember, unless you’re easily completing strict pull-ups with perfect form at high rep ranges, this move is not for you. 

Work on your pull-ups until you can do at least 4 sets of 15 standard pull-ups with ease. After that, you can try advancing to right pull-ups, weighted pull-ups, muscle-up progressions, or other more advanced variations. 

References

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