 Welcome back to the School of Calisthenics. We've got great videos for you looking at a back lever basics. The back lever was actually the first thing that me and Tim both did and got us hooked in calisthenics right at the start. Now it looks quite complex, but actually it's far more achievable than you may think. A lot of people ask us, prefer a back lever, how do you even get into that position in the first place? That's a fairly easy bit and we're going to show you that. And the second bit we're going to show you is once you're in that position, how do you create tension? To do one of the easiest gravity defying moves in calisthenics. So the first point of a back lever is being able to skin the cat. That's going to help us to take the shoulder through the range of movement and get the hips in a position where we can start to create some tension. Jacko's going to give us a quick demonstration. We're using the rings here so he's going to do an active hang to start off with. So what that means is setting the shoulder blades in is going to try and pull them down. You can see the shoulders move away from the ears. What that does is create stability across the shoulder from which he can now start to move the rest of his body. If he sits in a dead hang, it's really difficult for us to actually create enough tension to get around. So from this position, he pulls himself up. This might feel when you get to this stage that, right, I'm doing it, I'm all the way around. You've got to keep going until you can get those feet pretty much close to the floor. But what you're looking for is if you get this full-range rotation, which enables us to get a back flat, and then we can build on for the back lever. When you're starting to build a bit of confidence for the skin the cat, you might want to have a bit of a kick up to support you to get through because some of the pulling strength can be a little bit tricky while you're first learning. So you can see, give yourself a little bit of a nudge. This is actually a really stable position in front of the rings. It looks hard, but it's actually pretty comfortable. It gets a bit more difficult when you go backwards. You can see here that Jaco's pointing his palms to the ceiling, rotating the shoulder inwards when the first learning is a back lever, and he comes through into this position. And if he's strong enough, he can either pull himself back through or just pop his feet on the floor and walk back out of it and let go. The two different ways for the back lever. You will see people doing a back lever with the palms down. We wanted to learn at the beginning with the palms up. What it does is it screws the shoulder into a nice stable position, makes it a much more safe position to achieve as we're beginning our back lever journey. The rings gives a really comfortable starting point because you can put them quite close to the floor whilst you build the confidence. When you get to that point and you're happy with your skin the cat, you can take it onto the bar, exactly the same position, overhand grip and then Jaco is going to go, you'll see him really in this position, he goes to active hanging position, pulls himself through, a bit of hip and lower body flexibility to get their feet between their hands. He pulls himself around and actually this German hanging position is the end of our skin the cat. But it just shows we've got full range of movement. You can see there with the palms still facing towards the ceiling when he's in that rotated position, it screws the shoulder in nice and tight. It can come back through and complete the rep. Skin the cat then taught you how to get around and start again into some of these positions to build up your back lever. Next part though, and this is where the magic really starts to happen, is in the movement patterning exercise, the walk back lever that we like to call where we're starting to link muscles together in this chain to be able to activate them correctly so that they will actually hold you in this position. We're going to do it nice and easy with the feet on the floor. So Tim walks himself forward, he's got the rings, he turns them outwards so that his palm is facing up to the ceiling just like in the skin the cat. And then he can just rest slack in this position. The further his feet are back the harder this is so you can make it easier or harder for you. But just start nice and easy. All we're trying to do is get the right activation pattern. So first thing he does is he squeezes his bum on and pushes the hips forward. He then locks his rib cage down, he's ab tight like he's ready to take a punch. The shoulders then he's trying to pack them in tight into the socket. And then he's also trying to squeeze his bicep to his side to almost pinch my hand in there. Whilst he maintains all of that to keep that alignment the shoulder in a nice stable position. The next bit is the strength to be able to pull hand down towards the hip to leverage himself up. And as you see that he moved up, he stays in one nice straight line bum on, core on, shoulders packed in tight, squeezing bicep to his side and then he's pausing at the top to maintain that tension. It's this position here driving the hand down towards the hip shortening that angle that the shoulder is making with the body is where you have to be strong to hold the back lever. And you're going to be able to hold it for real is when you've built up enough of that strength and whether you're actually strong enough through there to hold it. But before you can be strong in this position we need to learn and teach the brain how to actually activate in that whole pattern in one complete movement. So that exercise is brilliant for that with your feet on the floor and that is one to get in your program. So that's the end of the first lesson on back lever basics. We've shown you how to get into a position and then also how to start to create tension through the chain which is going to support your body weight when you've got your feet off the ground. One of the reasons why this is so easy to learn is you've got a bit of strength training background and why it was the first movement that we learned is actually you've got the basic strength to be able to do it. The real key is being able to start to teach the brain to activate the right muscle patterns together at the same time. And when we do that, sometimes at workshops people do it right in front of you for the very first time because they are as strong as they just haven't got that activation exercise. So if that's you, you might be well on your way to be able to get there. If you need a little bit of my help and you want a natural guide to follow we've got our back lever training guide on the website so you can always check that out but we've got some more content for this back lever coming for you in the coming weeks. So keep your eyes out for lesson number two until then class dismissed.