 Welcome back to the School Classes. It's Tim and Jaco and tell us what we've got today Tim. Well we're going to look at maybe the best back lever exercise that you're not doing and it could be the misalinking your progression. So the back lever is all about connection. You've got to create a specific body position and you've got to be able to apply force in that position. Now the big thing is about when you can close the angle between the bar or rings and your hips. You've got to create this downward force and if we can do that we create the necessary positions but to shift the head slightly forward to counterbalance the weight which we're going to experience when you start to shift the legs out behind us. So we're going to go through this exercise today with a couple of little variations on it that allow it to regress or progress to exactly the strength needs that you're at because that's one of the most important things with these progressions, these exercises as well. If you do something that's too hard or too easy you're not going to progress at the rate that you want it. So we're going to pick this up assuming that you can skin the cat. If you can't do that you can jump back and have a look our recent series that we did on the back lever basics and it's also included in our free beginners guide which you can download from the website. So we're going to start off there and Jaco is actually going to use a band so we're going to pick this up at a pull through exercise. So using the band is going to provide a little bit of support like a cradle so he just loops it on the inside. So we've got this piece here which when he skins the cat he's just going to rest his hips onto that and it's going to give us a little bit of support meaning we don't need as much muscle strength from the shoulder. So Jaco is going to sit himself through he skins the cat around. When we finish the skin the cat movement typically we're found in this rounder position here. Now to create a stable foundation from which we can move to the next progression we've got to do this pull through exercise which is starting to teach us to get the hands pulling down towards the hips and lifting the hips up so he flattens the spine out making yourself nice and long and flat on the spinal position. This is the first point of starting to understand that hand to hip position creating the tension that you need for the back lever and when we can do that we can then start to add a little bit more complexity into that position. In that pull through position you can start to put some reps together just let yourself slump back into that rounder shape and then extending the back out creating the tension with the shoulders to pull the hands to hips. You can put some reps together one of really effective ways of building some strength in that position is just to hold it for about 10 seconds and put some time on the tension that way just wreck up four five sets 10 second holds that's going to help to start you to develop some more strength in that back lever position. Now the third thing that you can do though is actually start when you start getting stronger you're going to feel like your hips are lifting up and that's a really effective progression that we can use. So Jaco drops into the skin the cat it does his pull through now if he starts putting a decent amount of force down you're going to see his hips rise back up and he comes into this inverted hanging position and he can send himself back down and again what you're doing is training yourself to close that angle between the hands and the hips that's the position that we need to get to so we can actually create that foundation so we can extend the legs the more strength we have here the more force we're generating and then the more weight we can distribute behind the body as we start to extend the legs out. A really important thing for us at the school of calisthenics is to make sure that we're giving you progressions and exercises that you can do regardless of how far you are into your calisthenics journey the back lever is no different so here's just a couple of extra tips which are going to help you to get started and what was the first thing that we ever learned and it is a really achievable calisthenics movement. So in this shape of starting to understand how to create that tension and create that foundation of which you can move from we can use a thicker band if we want to like this so Jaco's only gone for red one because he's quite strong but we could if we were starting out go for a nice big fat springy band the other thing we can do is actually increase the amount of tension and support so if we just make this band shorter we get more support on the band as we go around and the last little progression that we've got is actually as you get stronger you're going to feel that you can start to extend more weight behind you so that just means taking one leg out or two legs or a straddle so Jaco can give us a quick demonstration you can still use the bands for these because it helps the neural connection starting to learn the movement but if he takes one leg out and pulls through in that position we've just got this amount of weight that we're then adding to the movement or we could actually throw a second leg out and he can straddle which makes it a little bit easier again just playing around in this position with the length of the lever where the weight distribution is and we've all the time got options to make this exercise more difficult so that we can always train it at a level where we're getting some adaptation we're stimulating some overload and doing those things is going to help us to nail that back lever today have it one exercise that you're not doing that's going to be perfect for your back lever and it's working all the time on that strength into it by getting that hand down towards the hip and closing that angle at the shoulder remember you've got the use of the band which is you can make it as thick a band or a thinner band or you can change the tension you use on that band as well as changing those leg length positions to affect the lever length so if I was going to throw one exercise in if I could skin the cat and I wanted to get that back lever that is absolutely where I'd be spending my time do loads of that you're going to get your back lever before long yeah if you need and want some more specific help in a program to follow we've got the back lever training guide for that as well obviously and that's there for you if you feel like you need it so until next time that's dismissed