💪 To gather courage 🏋️ To pull over bar

to muscle up

6.4

Pull yourself up and push your body over a bar or rings in one movement

phrasal verb

Jargon

: muscle up

After months of training, she finally performed her first muscle up on the gym rings.

Examples

So the next one is to do a muscle up in rings.
But what you should do to train the muscle up is to use this.
To achieve a muscle up, you need to combine a strong pull-up with a smooth dip over the bar.
The coach demonstrated how to do a proper muscle up by pulling up and pushing down in one fluid motion.

How Hard

to muscle up

Jargon

6.4

pull-up

7 3.9

chin-up

5.1

Surface Forms

muscle up infinitive

muscle uped past

muscle uped past participle

muscle upping present participle

muscle ups third person singular

Morphology

muscle + up

The parts 'muscle' (strength/physical effort) and 'up' (movement to a higher position) give a B1 learner a clear hint that the expression involves using strength to move upward, so a general sense (pulling oneself upward) is inferable. However, the specific gymnastic meaning—a pull-up immediately followed by a dip in one continuous movement—is a technical, specialized sense that is not fully predictable from the constituents, making the expression only partially transparent.

Etymology

Muscle up is the name of a gym move where you use your muscle to pull yourself up and then push your body over a bar or rings. So it literally means 'to pull yourself up and push over' in fitness.