This is NOT easy to do
A lot of of fitness tutorials on YouTube are nonsense and I thought I’d share a perfect example of this. My client Seb and I have been working on some advanced gymnastic moves including the gravity-defying ‘planche’ - a very hard move to master that can take people years to master. We’ve made some good progress but wanted to see the steps that other people have taken to achieve it.
One of the first videos we saw was by a well-known calisthenics athlete so we had a look. Step one was relatively straight-forward (but took us a month to master); step two was insane. Step two was a ridiculous jump from step one and completely impossible to achieve. Seb and I agreed that anyone who looked at the video would quickly come to the conclusion that they would never be able to achieve the planche.
A lot of gymnastic/bodyweight moves, be it pull-ups, press-ups, L-Sits or more advanced work require lots of work and need to be broken down into small steps (“progressions”). Videos like the one we saw offer no realistic, useful guidance or acknowledgement that these kinds of moves take a long time to master.
To give you a real-life example, for Seb to be able to get into and hold the planche part-straddle with a thin band, we’ve had to achieve 6+ steps beforehand.
There are some amazing, useful videos online but a lot of what I’ve come across is poor and having learnt and taught clients how to perform some of these moves, it has been an eye-opening experience. To state the bleeding obvious, if something looks hard to do, it probably is - and will take a lot of hard work, some proper training and a ridiculous amount of trial and error.