Elbows locked for Front Lever?

[Howell]

The book says to keep the arms straight with the fingers pointed away during a front lever. Now does this mean to completely lock your elbows and have your inner elbow point toward each other? Or can they as straight as possible without being locked? Thanks for any advice!

Also.. Does anyone know if the All Muscle, No Iron book will still be coming out someday?

[Patrick Angelo Sardilli]

Locked Elbows = Straight Arms

About the book noone knows yet.

Hope this answers

[Joshua Naterman]

That book will be released, eventually. I wouldn't worry about that because it is entirely advanced ring strength, and until you have completed Coach's elbow conditioning for the Iron Cross progression you will not be able to successfully use anything that will be in that book. I would imagine that these conditioning stages will also be explored in more detail, so that may be useful, but the basics that are prep for that book are available for free on this website.

Your inner elbows aren't going to be perfectly pointed at each other, but they shouldn't be pointed at the sky either. Your knuckles will be pointed at the ceiling. Your elbows will be wherever you point them I guess, but my inner elbows are always pointed slightly up. You do want locked arms. If you can't do that right away, that's ok, but don't move on in progressions until the one you use is done with those locked arms. If your arms go significantly past 180 degrees, I would think you want to concentrate on keeping them perfectly straight, but Coach will need to provide the real answer for that situation.

[Howell]

So just to make sure I'm getting this right.. My biceps and triceps shouldn't be contracted at all. I'm just letting my arm go limp except for my forearms to hold on. Is this correct? Cause man it hurts!

[Marlon]

Your arms should absolutely not be limp. When you are doing fundamental static positions you want to be trying to create as much tension throughout your entire body as possible. Your triceps should be working hard to keep your elbows locked as well as to help close your shoulder angle, and if you are working hard your biceps will probably be tense too, but they don't really provide anything but increased tension and stability for your elbow joint.

What exactly do you mean when you say it hurts? If any of the front lever progressions are done properly you shouldn't be in any kind of pain at all, except maybe a "feel the burn" kind of pain if you are holding for a long duration.

[Joshua Naterman]

Yea that just sounds strange. You CAN'T do a front lever without your triceps, that's simply not possible. Your arm would bend. A lot.

You will be contracting your triceps, upper back, core, and probably a few other things quite hard. You should be trying to bring your hands next to your hips while retracting the shoulder blades and keeping your core steady and horizontal.

To get the feel for this, start in an inverted hang. Lock your core (contract everything), retract your shoulder blades (pinch them together) and contract your triceps HARD! Now, try and take 4-5 seconds to lower down to the front lever with STRAIGHT ARMS! Try to keep your hands next to your hips, just like they are in the inverted hang. Your hips will drop lower than your hands, of course, but that should be involuntary. Stop at the horizontal FL position. It doesn't matter if you are tucked or not, do what you can. If you can not keep your shoulder blades retracted you are not ready for the front lever work yet.

[Howell]

Great, thanks for everyone's help! Yeah I'm pretty sure I've been doing it right but I read in the book to straighten the arms so I started watching my own form which was to have the triceps and biceps contracting but with my arm ever so slightly bent as a result, and I mean by like 1[degrees][/degrees]. So I was trying to figure out how I could completely straighten them and found the only way was to use only my forarms to hold on and to completely relax my arms, of course my elbows hyper extended a little and I couldn't hold even a tuck position for more than a few seconds. Afterwards I had some temporary pain around my elbows. Clearly I read too far into what Coach said in the book, I was just making sure I wasn't using bad form that I needed to fix. Thanks again for the advice!