Building Elite Calisthenics Strength: Planche & Front Lever Training vs Minimalist Bodybuilding

40 minutes a week of training has given me an enormous amount in terms of muscle mass, physique, and my general strength.

But, if you ask me to do any really high-level calisthenic skill like a planche, I'm cooked. In this video, I

want to break down the difference between the strength and muscle mass built by such a simple system as the one

I've used versus the specificity required by elite movements like the planche, and share the experiment that

I've been running over the past month to find out just what it takes to progress on some of these extremely challenging

calisthenic movements. Recently, I've talked about the difference between the really high-leverage work that gets you

a huge amount of benefits for a very small time input versus the large amount of remaining work that you can do to

make progress, for example, in specific movement patterns. That gives you a lot more specific return on your time and

effort. And the more I learn about the world of high-level calisthenics and some of these much more advanced

strength skills, the more I'm realizing that the pursuit of elite bodyweight strength very much falls into that

category of a lot more work for a lot less functional benefit. I've been able to build a really good base of muscle

mass with my method of training the six basic movement patterns, large range of motion, and working at range as hard as

possible. Few short efforts a week focusing on recovery, allowing my body to grow stronger. My physique is what I

always wanted to be, very happy with that. And as I've talked about, I think the biggest win is just how easy and

time-efficient it has been to achieve. I've also got some amazing byproduct strength, which is cool and fun to play

around with, but I'm far from a calisthenics beast. I can barely hold a solid tuck planche. So, a big part of

the recent research I've been doing to find out how I can get more from the training that I'm doing has been

revolved around calisthenic skills and what it takes to be able to build the specific strength needed to do them.

Now, just from training my six basics, I have got a short karate front lever, partial range one-arm chin-ups, a dodgy

range of handstand presses. I do have a full range handstand push-up, and then things like muscle-ups, back levers,

lower-level skills like that are quite easy. In testing recently I've even found I can do short human flags. Yeah,

all of this with no specific practice, just the 40 minutes a week six basic movements that I talk about. What I've

been interested in learning is what it takes in addition to this to learn things like planches, full range one arm

chin ups, longer front lever holds, front lever pull ups, 90° push ups, this sort of range of next level skills. So

what I'm starting with and the main thing I've been focused on the last month has been mainly on the planche and

front lever these two positions. So walk you through what I've been playing around with to improve my strength in

these positions. But first I want to share the general things I've learned from this experience already. I have a

lot of respect for calisthenics athletes and gymnasts who do these crazy strength moves. I'm going to reserve judgement on

how worth it I think pursuing these things are for a later video once I've had some more time to make some progress

and gather more experience. But the way I see this working is that you've kind of got two components to think about.

You have the machinery of your body, your muscle mass, basically structures, your raw tissue. And then you have your

operating system, you have your neuromuscular coordination. A lot of the learning that happens up here, which

allows you to use that hardware to perform certain movements. Some moves like handstands are massively biased

towards the skill component. You don't need a lot of strength to do them. I've talked about how I think the best way to

build a solid handstand is by building a lot of raw strength so you can handle the movement. And that is just the

general way that I lean because I see that strength giving you so much more than just learning the skill. But with

some of these other movements like planches, these are much more demanding strength wise and so you actually can't

get around technique or skill with raw strength. You need both. And for a planche you need both to be at a really

high level. Both your raw ability to exert force and your coordination between all your muscles to exert force

together in the right way to hold the position need to be on point. Now upgrading the hardware, building muscle

mass, is pretty straightforward. And as I've talked about at length, it does not take much time. Three intense 10 to 15

minutes sessions a week ample to trigger massive amounts of growth and consistently build muscle, get stronger

all the way up to where you see me and beyond. Because the bottleneck is just muscle growth. Your body has to go and

do that while you're resting and sleeping. And so, as long as your recovery and nutrition are reasonably

dialed, you stimulate the growth effectively, you can get done in very little time,

which is awesome. However, learning difficult skills, upgrading the software to use all of your physical machinery in

a highly efficient manner for a very specific skill, takes a lot more training. The other hard thing about

that is that every bit of training that you do to upgrade the software taxes the hardware. And so, again, I wouldn't

consider myself very advanced in calisthenic skills, but it's already bleedingly clear to me that you need to

be much more dialed in on managing fatigue and recovery whilst you do this training because essentially you want to

maximize exposure to the learning stimulus. The other thing that's very clear is that the training stimulus

needs to be hyper specific. If you want to learn tennis, there is no secret that you need to play a lot of tennis.

Doesn't it matter how many air swing forehand drills you do or footwork practice. If you don't play tennis, you

are never going to reach any decent level of tennis. Similarly, if you want to learn a planche, then you need to

train the planche. Does not matter if you've got a massive bench press and your shoulder flexion is really strong,

which is the prime movement in a planche. Even if you have crazy strength in that position, it does not

automatically translate to being able to hold your body in a plank with straight arms. Because it just requires an

honestly different muscle activation and coordination. The other thing to bear in mind that I'll come back to down the

road when we talk about trade-offs and what's worth your time and energy investment. The specific work required

to train some of these skills, it's quite universally accepted that that work is quite isolated in what it gives

you. And so, to learn the planche, you need to spend a lot of time training the planche. But, training the planche

doesn't necessarily give you a huge amount else other than planche. So, working a really limited range of motion

limits the amount of strength you gain largely to that range of motion. And it also is much less effective for building

muscle mass. And so, I think it's worth keeping in the back of your mind that if you're trying to get maximum output from

your training input, and you want to build muscle and a good physique, targeting these sorts of specific skills

is probably not the most efficient way to do it. Which is why I haven't put any emphasis on today. And I'm still not

convinced how dedicated I am to pushing the boundaries, but I'm interested again to see what that trade-off actually

looks like. So, we'll do it all for science. So, the current experiments what I've been playing around with

lately has just been a a very focused bit of additional strength skill work on top of my normal gains focused six

movements training, which I last did an update on in this video. I've been doing this additional work purely focused on

building two skills, complementary antagonists, the planche and the front lever position. My starting point is a

very uninspiring tuck planche and a temperamental front lever. If I'm feeling strong, I can bang out one of

these for a couple seconds, but I've never got really long holds. So, it's solid, but I would like to be able to

hold it for longer. So, the goals ideally are to get to an advanced tuck and ideally a straddle planche that I

can hold for 3 seconds, and to extend my front lever to be a consistent 5-second hold with clean form. Arbitrary goals,

but just things that would mean tangible, measurable progress on these basic, but difficult skills. That's it.

As I said today, all I have done to train these is pulling from the front lever position and doing rows through

range of motion that gets my elbows just past my body, and working through a push-up, planche, push-up movement with

not a lot of emphasis at all on good planche positioning at the top, either at the start or the end of reps, which

may have something to do with my planche ability. I'll talk more to that sort of integration in an upcoming video. For

now, I want to talk about the specific straight arm work. So, the concept here is getting exposure to these specific

positions, trying as hard as possible to be hold the best position that I can, and doing that across enough weekly

volume to stimulate strength gain in the position, making that hard enough that it is challenging and stimulates

adaptation, but also making it easy enough so that I can accumulate volume and overall training stimulus in the

position with enough frequency over the week to get the adaptations that I want. So, I split this into two days, which

just line up with my current AB workout split. So, I'm training each of them three times a week. So, every workout I

would start with a couple of holds for each. Both days are really high effort, but one is high intensity or absolute

difficulty, and the other is a bit easier and allows me to accumulate more time in these positions. So, in the

intense day, I'm just attempting the hardest version I can for a couple second hold. So, this has been scaled

back to straddle front levers, tuck planches, trying to get good form. And then I'm just scaling both of those

back and doing sets that I can hold for close to the range of 8 to 12 seconds, fully focused on maximum effort the

whole time, trying to get the best possible form at all times, but pushing that pretty much to form breakdown

failure. And I'm treating this exactly like normal strength training, doing three sets of those alternating push

versus pull before I move on to do the same exact thing with my full range max effort bent arm work. So, that's the

heavy day, and then the volume lighter day, I'm just scaling that back a bit more to allow longer holds. I've either

played around with bands for the first time, or I'm just scaling down by progression, making it easier. And then

instead of doing raw holds, I'm doing some dynamic work just to mix things up and get some more range of motion. So,

doing front lever pulls and these sort of dynamic planche leans. The idea is just three times a week to accumulate as

much time as possible practicing these positions working as hard as I can, but making it easy enough that I can

actually work it for a reasonable amount of training time. That's it. There's only been about a month, so I don't have

a huge amount of strength gains to show you or any data, but that's what I'm doing. It's been quite fun. Early things

I will say again back to trade-offs, this is like blown out my training time more than double. And so, for some very

specific skill work, my sessions have gone from 15 to 20 minutes to over 40 now. So, going back to this video where

we talk about the asymmetrical return on time investment, this is not what I would recommend to people who want a

higher return on their training time. But, I'm interested to see how my body responds and how those specific skills

develop. So, stay tuned, but I hope this is interesting. If you want help with the high-leverage stuff, you want to

build an incredible physique that can do basically everything that matters strength and mobility wise, then you can

learn all about our system and how I help people by watching the free training link below in the description.

Thanks so much for watching. Speak to you soon.