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Episode 5 - I talk about elbow protection and my current progress

The Road to Front Lever Pull Ups - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7lJ8...

The Road to Front Lever Pull Ups - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7lJ8...

Hey there it’s time for a new episode of the road to full planche. In the previous video I stressed out that I was stressed out about the fact that I had a one legged planche but with too much hollow body instead of the right amount of hollow body. In this video I will show you some of my less successful and then some of my more successful attempts at achieving a good form one leg planche. After that I will talk about something that everyone always asks, which is how much time does the full planche take to learn. Let’s begin with my attempts.
Well hey look at that, I did it, for three seconds. So with too much hollow body I can hold a one leg planche now for over 10 seconds, but only 3 with a proper hollow body and that really does show you how much more difficult it becomes when try to make your form perfect. If you want to become stronger I suggest you start doing proper hollow body attempts at whatever level of planche you might be, don’t simply have your body in a super exaggerated hollow position.
Also keep in mind that what you just saw were attempts in the span of a full month. Planche progression is really, really slow. Those failed attempts of mine were from the first three weeks and if I was less experienced I would have gotten quite depressed because I would have felt as if I wasn’t progressing for 3 weeks and I might have made the mistake of increasing my static hold training either by increasing the number of holds per workout or the overall number of workouts per week and I would risk injuring myself. All of that because of the feeling of no progress.
That’s how planche progress is sometimes, it makes you feel like a piece of shit for a long time, but since I stayed true to my training schedule, since I always had my 2 days of rest between pushing strength workouts, in the end I was rewarded with this progress. Some of you might think its small progress, but it really isn’t because this position is miles ahead of this one.
With all of that being said let’s talk about how long it takes to learn the full planche. So first of all, I don’t think that’s a good question, I think it should be split into two questions.
1st How long will it take for a complete beginner to learn a tuck planche?
2nd How long will it take to go from a tuck to a full planche?
Because if you can’t do a solid and proper tuck planche, you have no business, in my opinion, asking anything whatsoever about a full planche. To answer the first question, my guess would be anywhere between 4 and 12 months should be enough for a complete beginner to learn a tuck planche. By complete beginner I mean someone who is struggling with basic pull ups, chin-ups, dips and pushups. The way I achieved a tuck planche was automatically, meaning that I didn’t do any direct static hold training to achieve it. I spent a lot of time doing basic pushups, dips, pull ups and chin ups and I threw in some additional weight from time to time. One day I saw Hannibal for King and I wanted to learn a planche so when I tried to do a tuck planche I automatically had acquired it all from basic training. Many of my friends who trained with me also never trained for a tuck planche directly. All we did was basic pulling and pushing exercises.
To answer the second question, my guess is it would take anywhere from 6 to 24 months to go form a tuck to a full planche. And a lot of people ask me also about - how much time should we be able to hold a certain level of planche before moving on to the next one? One of my friends could hold a planche lean, but not a tuck planche and he was like “Man I can hold it for 30 seconds, but I can’t do a tuck planche?” When he showed me his attempt however, firstly he could have been leaning more forward, but secondly it was clear that he used 100% of his strength to hold the planche lean. This in my opinion is the biggest reason people don’t progress to the next level of planches, even though they hold a previous level for about 30 seconds, they are doing in a very strenuous way – they look like they are vibrating. This shows that you don’t have enough strength to move on to the next level even though you are holding the position for a long time.
So for example with my situation, I can’t hold a tuck planche for more than 25 seconds, but I am holding in a very solid way, there is no vibrating – this shows that I don’t have to use my full strength to hold the position and that is why I can hold the advance tuck planche. The reason why I am struggling to hold the one leg planche properly for more than 3 seconds is because I still need to improve the advance tuck planche to the point where it is very solid. As you can see I can hold an advance tuck for over 10 seconds but I’m vibrating all over the place after the 5th second, this shows that the position takes about 95-100% of my strength and that is what I will have to improve.