I can't be quiet anymore. As a collegiately educated strength coach, I have a civil duty to the strength community to say something. Clapping at the top of a pull-up doesn't make it explosive anymore than clapping in the bottom of a dead hang does.
When people do clapping pull-ups, they stop going up (watch any video on YouTube) at the top. They get into their maximum range of motion, stop, release the bar, and clap. So ask yourself, are you being explosive if you don't have any excess momentum to drive you any higher? Let’s take this and apply it to tried and true explosive movements like the jump squats. At the top of your range of motion, you accelerate into the air, gain full triple extension (ankles, knees, hips), come back down, and land. Let’s reset this movement and apply our “explosive pull-up protocol.” When you reach the top of your range of motion (fully erect position), throw the brakes on so that the top of your head doesn't go any higher. Lift your feet off the ground and click your heels together.
One thing had to happen here for this to work correctly. You had to move slow enough that at the top there wasn't any excess momentum preventing you from going any higher. This simple act changed it from a jump to just a good old-fashioned standing up with a little flair at the end. Yes, it was a test of coordination, but was it explosive? Not even close.
This leads into the next realm of explosive pull-ups—kipping pull-ups, butterfly pull-ups, or whatever your “box” calls them. At my “gym,” we like to say cheating. I'm old school like that. First, go back to our jump squat
(no countermovement). Use the raw wattage of your quads to propel yourself off the floor into the air and go higher than your fully extended range of motion. This is raw lower body power. Our other option is countermovement jump squats. This is when you swing your arms while quickly turning around elastic reflexive motions in the hips to get extra momentum. This isn't a true test of lower body power. However, it is still definitely explosive. I know what you're thinking—cheat pull-ups are explosive because you can soar over the bar with a countermovement. Deceptively, no. It's really just a display of full body strength, not explosive strength, unless at the very height of your range of motion, you're letting go of the bar and propelling upward. Of course, this would have to be measured by the total height of your head off the floor.
For measuring explosive lower body strength, we already have a test. It works like this—do a maximum vertical jump without any countermovement and a four-second pause at the bottom. Repeat the test with a countermovement jump. Measure the distance between the two and decide if you need to work on your elastic reflexive skills or good old-fashioned strength skills, depending on the percentage of difference. I haven't seen any numbers on a test like this to compare pulling strength versus cheat pull-up strength. I think we all know where this would go due to the amount of inertia your legs can create (due to their weight) and that is you aren't a strong enough puller. Probably none of us are.
So what does this tell us? Instead of clapping at the top of your pull-ups, you need to do weighted pull-ups close to your 3–5 rep max because you can't produce the force from a dead hang pull-up that comes anywhere near the momentum you can develop by cheating.