 Welcome back to the School of Calisthenics, it's Tim and Jaco and this week, what are we doing? We are looking at the human flag exercise that you're not doing. Sometimes we talk about a human flag and I'm guilty of saying that it's not that difficult. It looks impossible but when you break it down it really is much more achievable than you think. Yeah and it certainly did feel impossible. I remember flipping when we started trying to do it for the first time. For sure. But yes it isn't impossible but we need to do three key things. Where we're pulling with the top arm, pushing with the bottom arm and connecting the hip on the top side to that top arm palm. So we've got this best exercise for you that's going to link all that together and a few little progressions for it and we're pretty sure. Unless you've got our ebook already, you haven't seen this one. So all we need to get started is any vertical pulse we're using off the side of a squat rack and a bench. So Tim's going to go firstly into the right position so we just get used to this action of pushing with one arm and pulling with the other. The brain doesn't know how to do those two things. So the bottom arm is thumb pointing down, palm opened up. Top arm as you would do overhand in a normal pull-up grip. So this one is pulling and this one is pushing and they're going to be doing it at the same time. He's got to for his start position push that shoulder through for that pushing action and then crank that top arm in like an active hang position. So you see him almost sliding across the bench. The rest of his body, his hip is on the bench he's supported by the bench so he can start to piece together this push and pulling action that's going to create torque because they're two opposite forces. And that's why we're going to build up some strength to lift up. But before we can build the strength we've got to have this what we call movement pattern of connecting those two things together. So that's your push and pull of opposite arms sword to be. And notice we said at the beginning there's also this connection of the hip up and we've got to build up some strength also. So it's not just about having that connection we've got to get strong there. So we've turned the bench 90 degrees or it's now perpendicular. It's a fancy word for you just turn it around. So it's now sideways on Tim goes into the same position. His hip is just going to be on the edge of the of the bench. So his hip is just on the edge. He takes that same grip and then he's going to firstly we've got these three things. He's going to push and open that bottom arm up. So that's pushing and he's going to pull this top arm into the socket. So you see that movement towards then the final thing is going to pull that hip towards that shoulder. And if he just relaxes that to show this one again pushes through the bottom arm pulls with the top and then this movement there towards their shoulder. That's what lifts the leg up. He's not trying to lift his leg up. He pulls the hip towards the shoulder. He's going to feel this working hard at him. Yeah, and that's what lifts the leg up. That's the key. You get those three things three things set in your golden. You're good to go. Now, one of the weaknesses we see for a lot of people when they're trying to learn the human flag, they've done loads of pushing, they've done loads of pulling. So those two elements for the arms are fine. Once they make that connection, that can get the movement pattern. The thing that we're lacking is this strength and the obliques to pull up the hip to that top shoulder and to keep the body actually horizontal. So we've moved the bench now a lot further in. You're going to see as Tim goes into into the position that the bench is now on his rib cage rather than on his hip. So it's closer to his pivot point, which is his shoulder. So this lever arm here becomes a lot longer. He does the same thing, pushes the bottom arm through, pulls with here and then raises the legs up by squeezing that hip towards that shoulder. This is going to be what's working and building up some actual applied specific strength to this human flag. That is often the weakest link. You can get the strength in there once you've made a link between your push and pull. That's where we start to see in possible things being redefined. So there's one exercise you're probably not doing that actually is building up the connection and the strength for your human flag. You know what Dave? I think I can feel it. So that's the first class lesson from Head of Human Flags, Dave Jackson and Dave, what are the two questions? The take or years, we need to build those connections, that movement pattern, that push and pull of the top arm and the bottom arm, but connecting it to that oblique and then time under tension, spend some time in there, five, ten seconds at least, building up strength through time under tension rather than what we did when we first started and we did what we're doing, just kicking up, kicking up and not actually making any progress. Take it back a step, learn the right movement and then get strong in there. There's a big piece in the human flag of skill acquisition. You've got to give yourself the opportunity to learn that new connection and learn to move in a new way. So until next time, class dismissed.