From 25 to 40+ Muscles: How Monkee Grips Transform the Pull-Up

From 25 to 40+ Muscles: How Monkee Grips Transform the Pull-Up

Most people think the pull-up is already a complete upper body exercise… until they try it with a rope-based grip and suddenly feel muscles they didn’t even know they had.

Here’s the truth:

✅ A standard pull-up recruits around 25 individual muscles.
✅ Switch to Monkee Grips, and now over 40 muscles start firing—especially deep in the fingers, forearms, shoulders, and core.
✅ Because instead of just hanging… you’re now fighting rotation, friction, and gravity with every millisecond of the pull.

Let’s break down why rope-based pull-ups instantly become one of the most brutally effective bodyweight exercises for total upper-body development.

Standard Pull-Ups: Powerful, but Predictable

When you hang from a fixed bar, your body knows exactly what to expect. The bar is rigid, your grip stays locked in place, and the strength demand travels along a straight, predictable path. That means your body can rely almost entirely on your lats, biceps, upper back, and light core assistance.

Main muscles heavily activated on a straight bar pull-up:

Lats
Biceps (brachialis, brachioradialis)
Rhomboids & mid traps
Lower traps (scapular depression)
Some core stabilization

That’s about 25 top contributing muscles doing most of the work — still a solid movement, but missing deeper stabilizers that only activate when your body feels threatened or unstable.

Introduce Instability and Your Body Goes on High Alert

When you switch to Monkee Grips, nothing feels automatic anymore. There’s no flat bar to rest on. No consistent surface to clamp onto. You now have to create friction to stay connected. More importantly, your body senses instability — which triggers a neuromuscular “survival mode” response.

To hang on, you have to continuously squeeze, adjust, stabilize, and resist spinning or slipping.

Suddenly your body recruits:

✅ Deep finger flexors to maintain friction
✅ Forearm flexors + extensors to balance the squeeze
✅ Wrist stabilizers to prevent rotational collapse
✅ Rotator cuff muscles to keep shoulders aligned
✅ Serratus anterior & lower traps to stabilize the scapula
✅ Transverse abdominis & obliques to stop torso twist

Your nervous system shifts from “pull upward” to “survive the entire movement.” Instead of 25 active muscles, you’ve just turned the exercise into a 40+ muscle chain reaction.

Try This: The “Fist Squeeze” Demonstration

Right now, ball your fists and squeeze them as hard as you possibly can.

That’s what your grip feels like throughout a Monkee Grip pull-up — not just at the top, but every second, even when you’re just hanging.

Now imagine performing a full pull-up while keeping that same crushing tension so you don’t slide off. That squeezing intensity is why rope-based pull-ups light up so many additional muscles. You’re not resting on a bar—you’re clinging to friction.

Thick Grips vs Rope Grips: Why One Activates More Muscles

Thick grips (like Fat Grip-style tools) increase crush demand, but they still offer a stable round platform. Worse, many are unsafe for vertical hanging movements since they can rotate or even slip off under load.

✅ Monkee Grips, however, attach using a secure cow hitch (also called a girth hitch), meaning they lock onto the bar and will not detach—while still forcing you to generate grip-driven friction.

That makes rope-based pull-ups not only more effective—but also safer for instability training.

Why More Muscle Activation = More Strength Gains

Pulling with more muscles doesn’t just feel harder — it builds stronger, more resilient tissue across your entire upper body.

🔥 More forearm engagement → stronger grip endurance
🔥 More tendon demand → tougher connective tissue
🔥 More anti-rotation → stronger obliques and transverse core
🔥 More shoulder stabilization → healthier scapular control
🔥 More neural activation → faster strength adaptation

This results in more gains per rep—with superior carryover to climbing, grappling, OCR, calisthenics, hockey, combat sports, tactical conditioning, and everyday pulling strength.

How to Safely Progress to Rope-Based Pull-Ups

Start by building friction-based endurance before chasing full reps:

✅ Farmer carries with Monkee Grips
✅ Assisted rope dead hangs (band or foot support)
✅ Dead row hangs (inverted rows with rope grips)
✅ Slow, full rope pull-ups with control
✅ Weighted or offset rope pull-ups (advanced)

Let your tendons adapt before adding intensity.

Final Thought: You’re Not Just Pulling — You’re Surviving the Rep

Bar pull-ups test your strength.
Monkee Grip pull-ups test your strength, stability, endurance, tendon integrity, and grit… all at once.

When you recruit more muscles, you don’t just get stronger—you get harder to break.

🎥 Want a full side-by-side muscle activation breakdown? Visit our YouTube channel for the visual comparison of 25 vs 40+ muscles in action.