With structure, six weeks of focused work at twice a week gets most athletes their first strict rep. Without structure, athletes spend months going in circles. The bottleneck is almost always the dead hang and the scapular control, not raw arm strength.

Strict is pure pulling strength: the body stays straight, no swing, only the arms and lats do the work. Kipping uses a hollow-to-arch swing to chain reps efficiently. Strict comes first. Without a strict base, the kipping pull-up loads a shoulder that cannot absorb the swing.

You are ready to try unassisted when you can do clean 6-8 band-assisted reps with a thin band, plus a 30-second strict dead hang. If you are still on a thick band, keep building the assisted volume and the negative pull-ups. The unassisted rep comes when the strict pattern is honest, not when you grind through it.

Not if you are consistent before and after. One week off is recovery, not regression. Three weeks off and the dead-hang strength starts to drop. The honest test is the negative pull-up. If a 4-second descent still feels controlled, you have not lost the base.

Yes. The dead hang is where your shoulder learns to be safe under load. If you cannot hold a 30-second strict hang with shoulders pulled down, you do not have the scapular control to pull yet, and the pull-up will load a fragile joint position. Build it first.

Lats and biceps do most of the pull, with the rear delts, rhomboids, and core stabilising the movement. The grip is the silent worker. Train the strict pull-up and you train a chain of muscles that show up in almost every gymnastics movement.