The Road to Full Planche - Episode 2 (Straight-arm Strength)

In the first episode I pointed out that bent-arm exercises are very important for planche progression. In today’s video I want to go into details about straight-arm training. The biggest problem many people face is that for some reason static holds don’t seem to be working. Most people reach the advanced tuck planche and don’t know how to progress beyond it. Well there are three reasons that I know of for why that might be happening. The first one I already discussed in episode 1 which is neglecting bent-arm exercises. The second reason is this – people want to go from advanced tuck planche to straddle. For some it might work, but for most people it won’t and what really sucks is that it might even lead you to a serious injury. Now what you should do instead is go into a one legged planche first and then you go into a straddle, right? WRONG! After you can hold the one legged planche you don’t go immediately into a straddle – you go into a half-lay straddle. The half-lay straddle planche is exactly like the half-lay planche but you only keep your feet together and the rest of the lower body like the knees and quads is straddled. So as you can see we are trying to skip these two levels and just going to this one and that can lead to disaster. In fact if you haven’t made it to this one you should be thankful, you should consider yourself lucky. Because in 2012 when I couldn’t go beyond the advanced tucked I went a little too far and almost did a straddle but what happened is that I injured myself. So because of my stubbornness I paid the ultimate price and had an elbow injury for 14 months. It wasn’t until February of 2014 that would I continue on the road to full planche. During those 14 months I had a lot of time to humble myself and reflect on what I had been doing wrong. I remember times where I would train static holds every day for 2-3 hours a day and that is the third mistake – overtraining your static holds. Not only will you stop progressing but you might injure yourself and people just don’t realize how easy it is to over train static holds. I know there’s some people out there that think overtraining doesn’t exist and it’s just an excuse, well I’m sorry but overtraining absolutely exists. Now when you do traditional exercises like pull ups and pushups it’s very hard to over train, but when we talk about static holds we must realize that we are dealing with a different beast altogether. Static holds put a lot of pressure on your joints and tendons and even your bones they don’t just work out your muscles. Like a lot of people think that a planche is about your shoulder strength and I’m not saying it isn’t, but something that is equally important is having a very strong elbow and all the muscles around it like the forearm and the biceps are super important. That is why when done right static holds put more pressure on that particular area instead of the shoulders and that’s why a lot of times when practice static holds we feel pain in this part of the body. You gotta understand that joints don’t have the same properties as muscles, they recover much more slowly than muscles and are easier to injure. Now that I’ve got that out of the way let’s talk about how to train properly. Unless you’re on steroids I don’t see how you can train static holds more than 3 times a week, like 3 times is the maximum without it being overtraining. I personally train static holds on Tuesday and Saturday and that’s it. Two times is the right amount as long the workout is done properly. So the workout itself is a lot less than what you might expect. Joints take less time to get a good workout and need more time to recover than muscles. What I do is 3 holds of the highest level of planche that I can hold with good form, then I do 3 holds of tuck planche and finish off with 6 planche leans. I try to focus most of my energy on the first three holds because that is where the strength progress is. The other 9 holds I do mostly for endurance.