How long to do planche

The Advanced Tuck Planche places even more bodyweight and stress on the shoulders. Begin by extending your legs out behind you as far as you can, creating the gap between your knees and abs. This displaces weight away from the centre of gravity, making the exercise more challenging.

Aim to hold this position for as long as possible, building up to a second hold in this position before advancing. When beginning the Advanced Tuck Planche, hold your legs extended for as long as you can, even if this is only a few seconds, then continue in regular Tuck Planche for time.

The next progression is the Extended Single Leg Planche. This again displaces more of your bodyweight away from the centre of gravity, further increasing exercise difficulty. Keep one leg tucked and extend the other — making sure to alternate legs each set. The Straddle Planche involves both legs being extended. The wider your legs are spread, the less difficult this exercise will be, as the weight is closer to the centre of gravity.

Flexibility, and hip strength, are key to mastering this phase. Once you have Straddle Planche nailed, just bring those legs together and you have nailed the Full Planche. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. The extensions are teaching your body what position to be in, not building much strength. So use them with other exercises that do build the strength, that you can hold for about 10 seconds, then you will start seeing rapid development. Hand placement is essential for learning the planche, there is a lot of weight being put on your arms, you need to have a solid support from floor to shoulder to be able to pull this off.

When you go to put your hands down, line them up with your shoulders. They should be shoulder width apart so they sit directly under your shoulders as you planche, this will provide you with the most stable support. What will be easiest to learn from is to have your hands slightly further round, so your thumbs point forward.

As you develop, you will notice your hands turn even further past 90 so they are facing backwards, like the pseudo planche. As I have said above, your wrists take a big pounding doing the planche. I have actually hurt my left forearm training the planche too much while also training for the competition I have in 2 weeks! Make sure you warm up your wrists properly giving them a good stretch in all directions, preferably on the floor so you can apply more even pressure and slowly and gently increase the range of motion over time.

I need to do strengthening exercises so I can maintain tension when I lean into a full planche, it is a long way forward after all. Your wrists are pretty delicate things so work on strengthening your grip and training floor isometrics to help build them up, make sure they get a good warm up before training, and try not to over do it, because your wrists can be injured easily and they are used a load in day to day life — you will find this out when you injure them! I have already written about the importance of developing locked arm strength.

The planche is one of the reasons you need to get this down. The frog stand is a great exercise for building up your locked arm strength and stability, having your knees against your upper arm will force your elbows straight, but be careful not to over train it or you will get achy elbows. Like I suggested in my previous post on Locked Arm Strength, collagen is the protein you need for joint care, look after your ligaments and feed them some of this stuff.

Shoulder strength and stability is the single most important element of the planche. If you can do a Dragon Flag, or an Elbow Lever, you can probably hold your body horizontally to the ground. The biggest struggle you will have with your planche training is building strong enough shoulders to support your body. The shoulders are big powerful levers but they need to be really really powerful if you want to planche, just like the front lever, it is the shoulders that will require the most work.

Now I risk sounding very hypocritical here, but I have already developed a lot of this strength, I am nearly there, which is why I have agreed to this challenge. Earlier in the year I kept repeatedly injuring my back, over and over. Unless you are specifically looking to injure yourself, do not try and master this exercise quickly, build slow, work hard and celebrate your little wins.

Planche is a really difficult movement as many muscles and joints are involved. It requiers a lot of patience. For every person the process is different. But why is that? It all depends on your background in sport, your weight, height and your body strength. Some of the people before starting calisthenics were gymnasts, so for them to do a planche is much easier.

While for a complete beginner whose first training was actually calisthenics, it will require extra work and time. People who have years of experience powerlifting could also struggle with learning how to perform a planche. They absolutely worked on their shoulders, biceps etc, and their muscles are strong to start planche, yet they are unable to do so.