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Chest-to-Bar Burpee

The chest-to-bar burpee raises the demand of the burpee pull-up by asking for a bigger, more forceful pull that brings the collarbones all the way to the bar. That extra range leans harder on the lats, mid-traps, and rear delts, making it a favorite finisher in competitive conditioning work. Expect grip and back fatigue to show up fast, so pace it and keep the pull crisp rather than grinding.

Equipment
Pull-Up Bar
Body part
Lats, Quads
Type
Cardio, Strength
Muscles worked
Target
Latissimus Dorsi, Rectus Femoris, Vastus Lateralis
Secondary
Pectoralis Major Sternocostal, Biceps Brachii Long Head, Biceps Brachii Short Head, Trapezius Middle, Deltoid Posterior, Gluteus Maximus
Tertiary
Triceps Brachii Lateral Head, Gastrocnemius Medial Head, Gastrocnemius Lateral Head, Upper Rectus Abdominals

How to do it

  1. 1

    Set up under a sturdy bar just out of standing reach and face it squarely.

  2. 2

    Drop into the burpee: hands down, feet back, chest to the floor, then press up.

  3. 3

    Jump your feet forward and explode upward toward the bar.

  4. 4

    Pull hard and pitch the chest back so the bar meets it below the collarbones.

  5. 5

    Control the way down to a dead hang, then release to the floor.

  6. 6

    Reset your feet and repeat for the prescribed reps.

Tips

  • Drive the elbows down and back and lean the torso away from the bar to reach the chest to it.
  • Use a controlled kip from the hips if you cannot get chest contact from a strict pull.
  • Break the set into small clusters before your grip fails so the pull stays honest.

Variations

Common mistakes

  • The chin gets thrown at the bar instead of the chest, which makes the rep an ordinary pull-up; contact belongs below the collarbones, and the torso has to travel to get there.
  • A bar hung low enough to jump straight onto lets the legs do the pulling, so the lats barely work and the standard quietly disappears.
  • The floor phase decays into a knees-down flop as the round drags on, and the chest stops touching; hold the chest-to-floor standard or cut the rep count.
  • A big swing arrives at the bar on the way up and leaves on the way down, so contact happens at the wrong point in the arc; keep the kip small enough that the chest meets the bar at the top of the pull.
  • Feet land too far behind the hands on the way out of the burpee, so you stand up leaning forward with nothing left to jump with.

Frequently asked

How many chest-to-bar burpees should you do, and what should you be able to do first?
Own five strict chest-to-bar pull-ups and a clean chest-to-floor burpee before you chain them together. Then start with five sets of three and a full minute of rest, judging the session by whether the last rep still reaches the chest. In conditioning work keep the total near 20 to 30 reps and break them into clusters of two or three from the very first set. Grip and lats fatigue faster than lungs here, so the honest limit is the rep where contact stops being real.
What can I do instead of a chest-to-bar burpee if I don't have a pull-up bar?
A sturdy playground bar or a barbell racked high in a squat rack works fine. With no bar at all, a burpee into a hard ring row under a table or on a suspension trainer gives the same push-then-pull pairing at whatever angle you can handle, and a burpee straight into a bent-over dumbbell row is the simplest version. If you have a bar but not the pull, use a lower one and jump into it, or loop a band under your feet, driving the elbows down as though contact were still required.
What is the chest-to-bar burpee good for, and who should avoid it?
It is a competitive conditioning movement: a full-body burpee stacked onto a maximal-range pull, which builds lat and mid-back endurance under a high heart rate and shows up constantly in event-style workouts. As a way to get stronger at pulling it is inefficient, since fatigue caps the reps long before the lats meet the load that weighted pull-ups give them. Skip it with an irritated shoulder or elbow, and skip it if your chest-to-floor push-up is shaky, because that half collapses first and takes the rest of the rep with it.

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