 Welcome back to the Schoolcast, it's Tim and Jacko and we are back today to talk about having fun with hanging. And all the training and performance benefits that come with it. So today we're going to look at a load of hanging variations and how we can start to manipulate our training environment and using that to have some fun with the training but get some massive performance benefits out of it as well. The thing that we get stuck in too often with our training is very simple one-dimensional movements in a sagittal plane when we're hanging we're thinking about pull-ups and we're thinking about pulling straight up and we're not exploring any other options and giving some options to the shoulder to move in some different ways. Those things are really important when it comes to human flag training on muscle ups. We need to develop end range and outer range strength and we're going to stay in that safe position we don't get the opportunity to do that. So lots of you have rigs in your gym, we've got one here, we've got a great opportunity partly because not many people really know how to use them effectively but we can start to think about different hanging variations, how we can move around the rig, have some fun with it, solve movement problems, set little challenges for ourselves but the whole time we're doing that we're starting to build strength particularly in hanging single arm movements which are going to transfer really well into your training and just build those bomb-proof shoulders that we know we can then put to use for some more fun in our more advanced calisthenics movements. So we're going to start with the basics and we're going to build it up from there and we're going to look at that active hang again but what we're going to do is as well as looking at this position of just moving up and down this shoulder has massive 360 degrees range of motion and what we're going to do is start to build up to be able to explore strength and stability and control in some of these positions outside of potentially our comfort zone where we've currently been working. So we're going to build this up from the basics right from the beginning of proper hanging technique which means you can then start to scale it as we show you the progressions but anybody can jump on board if you can hang from a bar, my little boy can hang from a bar so you can get something like that too. That's not him. I'm his big boy. Jump up Jacko so we're going to start just differentiating between an active hang and a dead hang so dead hang is when Jacko lets his body go slack we're just hanging on joint tissue some collected tissue no real muscle tension in there we've just got some traction on the joint the active position comes he's going to draw the shoulder blades down pulling the shoulders away from the ears you can see his head lifts up but elbows don't bend so it's all of it is being driven by these retractors in the shoulder we're pulling the shoulder blade back and down starting to create that upward lift. Active hang position is going to be the foundation from a lot of pulling movements now that's great and we could go into pull ups but what we really want to do is start to challenge this so we can build some more strength so the challenge now for Jacko is can he hold active hang and then can he start to then shift weight on to a single arm active hang that's our next progression you can see the first time if you're a bit unsure just let one kind of finger come off start to gently shift over and what I want him to do is better hold that active position and then transfer back onto the bar if you are training for your human flag that single arm active hang is the top arm of your human flag so it's an absolute real key movement in terms of developing that strength and competency so we can see he's doing a really nice job there hang swings across hold the active position that scapula is set down shoulders locked into the socket creating loads of tension and he's also thinking about what's happened down here the rest of the chain as well linking the shoulder with the hip starts to enable us to transfer forces through the chain really nicely and that is such an important part of calisthenics. Jacko is now going to go single arm and he's going to drop into a dead hang so we show you what that looks like so he transfers himself across into the active position and if he goes dead hang now lets the tension go you see the ear slumps down towards the shoulder the body is naturally going to want to unwind into this position the job now is can he crank that shoulder back down wind himself back up into the facing forward and then he pulls the shoulder bay back into a stable position so it can create that active shape again the whole time we're training grip strength as well which is doing a really good job for our rotator cuff and shoulder stability and we're working really nice progressive transition from different positions challenging the shoulder in different shapes. So let's look at some troubleshooting because this isn't that easy hanging on to the bar with just one arm in an active position is not necessarily that easy for people so we'll give you some options in how to train that and also looking for what we don't want to happen and how we're going to combat that because ultimately if you're going to save your life and be a hero one day you might need to hold on to the bar or rock by one arm so Tim's going to go into his active position and then as he transfers because what sometimes might happen is he starts to let that grip go and then all of a sudden loses that active position and then you see that unwind it's also going to have an effect on his grip he needs to keep that active position where he's constantly trying to pull that shoulder blade down and keep that separation between his ear and his shoulder so if we are finding that difficult one of the first things we can look at is not completely taking away the hand on the other side so rather than taking his hand completely off Tim can start to loosen a finger and maybe he can hold with three fingers two fingers or one finger so you can build up progressively the strength on the opposite side by taking off one sort of finger at a time which is nice sort of easy progressive approaches you can use straight away the other option we have is using resistance band so the band is going to take a little bit of load off of you and give you a little bit of support whilst you work on the mechanics of holding yourself and staying active on that one arm whilst the other side isn't doing anything at all so the other thing with the band that's nice is it keeps him honest in terms of his body line and shape so that ribcage down to be nice and tight bum on so he keeps that tight he's then able to hold and take that arm off and then with a little bit of support from the band he's able to work on those mechanics of holding that single arm in an active position and then what he can also do is give himself the opportunity to go out of that active position and come back into it just as we demonstrated before but with a little bit of help from the band it might mean that a rather than being able to just do it once this gives you enough capacity to build up sort of three or four transitions so you get a bit more capacity in the locker for some of these shoulder stabilizers that are holding you in that active position and those guys want to work under the higher amounts of sort of volume so having a more capacity in your training rather than making it a max strength type exercise is going to be beneficial so that's all of the science and the technical stuff out of the way now it's about time to put it into practice and start to challenge your grip in your shoulder in lots of different positions so we're going to look at like problem solving so Tim's going to start on the bar here and if you've got a rig in your gym you'll then got to like how can you get yourself over to another part of the rig where you've got no distinct like actual movement that you're going to go through you've just got to explore that and try and figure out how you're going to get to a different part changing all different ranges of motion challenging grip in different positions and having some fun whilst you do it so that's a little bit about how to have fun with hanging there is a lot of fun to be had but there's a ton of value for the shoulders as well creating stability in different positions a shoulder remember has so much range of movement it's important that we can start to generate different strengths in different positions creating stability as we challenge it in those range of movement and that's going to mean that we get a really stable shoulder and it's linked in with the kinetic chain and that means that your calisthenics train is going to accelerate purely because your system is better connected together and you can transfer forces and do it safely it's a great way for you to build up some strength in a fun and almost playful way as you're getting outside of your comfort zone challenging new different positions and then it's part of a warm-up it works beautifully to get the shoulder and grip fired up before any of your pushing sessions pulling sessions you're going to work into some different positions in calisthenics like your human flags and your muscle ups training this out of range strength like we said right at the top of this video is such an important part it's one of the the foundation parts have been able to do those more advanced movements a lot of people lack and it stumps their progression so building this into your warm-up it's just reloading sixes in one big box of putting a ton of benefit in your training so until next week class dismissed