In my previous front lever videos, I wrote down the math equations to show
that if you have longer arms, the front lever will be easier for you. However,
there are still so many people out there that refuse to believe basic physics. It truly blows
my mind. Therefore, I thought to myself, if these people can't understand basic physics,
they gotta eventually believe what I say if I put the theory into practice, right? Therefore,
I decided to ask my long-term partner Garret from Frictitous Climbing to make me an arm extender,
so I can show you how much easier the front lever would be for me if I were to be genetically gifted
with longer arms. Initially, I came up with the most straightforward design I could think of for
the arm extender and sketched it out and sent it to Frictitious Climbing. A handle on one end for
us to grab onto and a hook on the other end to hook onto the bar. Frictitious Climbing was able
to make this into a reality, and Garret even added functionalities to make the length from the hook
to the handle adjustable. When the front lever hooks arrived, I was excited to try them out,
but I quickly realized that it was very difficult to keep the front lever hooks and
the arms in the same line. If the front lever hooks and the arms are not in the same line,
it will become the same as doing a front lever on a normal pull-up bar, which defeats the purpose
of using front lever hooks in the first place. If I were to make this setup work, I would need
to have monster wrist strength to keep the front lever hooks and the arms in the same line. Since
wrist strength shouldn't be the focus here, I came up with another design attempting to take
wrist strength out of the equation and sent it to Frictitious Climbing. The idea is to simply
extend the wood from the handle, so there will be something for the forearms to rest on. Frictitious
Climbing was also able to make that happen. When the front lever hooks version 2 arrived,
again I was excited to try them out, but then I quickly realized that the wood extension from the
handle should have been on top of the forearms instead. I tried tying the front lever hooks
version 2 to my forearms with straps, but that didn't work too well because it was impossible
to create zero separation between my forearms and the wood extension even when they were strapped.
I had to go back to Frictitious Climbing again to ask Garret to extend the wood from the handle
in a different way so that the wood extension connects to the upper part of my forearm instead
of the lower part of my forearm. Fortunately, Frictitious Climbing was very patient with me
and made that happen for me. When the front lever hooks version 3 arrived, this happened.
As you can
see, I got a solid 5-second straddle front lever pretty much for free, and my shoulder
is not even 100% yet due to a rotator cuff injury from climbing. It's very reasonable to assume that
when my shoulder is fully recovered, I will be able to do a 5-second full front lever with the
front lever hooks version 3. I attempted the front lever on the same day without the hooks, and the
best I could do is a straddle super advanced tuck, which is far from my peak, the straddle half lay,
which I achieved a few years ago when I was all in on training the front lever. The front lever
hooks extended my arms by about 9 inches, which made my ape index go from negative 2 inches to
positive 7 inches. Although a positive 7-inch ape index is a bit exaggerated, this experiment
should be enough to put any doubt about longer arms making the front lever easier to an end.
In order to further show that the front lever hooks indeed works for everyone, I met up with
our good friend. Brandon,today I have a super fun gadget I want to show you, but first, can you
please do a, any front lever progression that you can hold for five seconds to see where you're at?
Nice. Oh, there you go. Oh. I have this gadget. This is called the front lever hooks,
so this is an experiment that I'm running. I'm curious to see whether this will help you improve
your front lever. Okay, this is interesting. I've never seen anything like this before.
So technically it's going to make my arms longer, which should help I guess. I could,
I don't know the physics. It should. It should, yeah. Okay, we'll see if the practice and the
theory, you know, kind of lines up. Oh, there you go! Oh my gosh! Nice. Damn.
Good job! That's, dude, and I said I've held it for like three seconds or whatever.
That's when I was training intensely for it, I haven't trained front lever at all lately,
so that's crazy I can actually hold it right now. Yeah, let's let cameraman Derek try it out.
Wow, look at Derek.
Nice! There you go. That's a solid five seconds. It's harder than before,
but I still got it. Alright, so now it's your turn.
Oh, yeah, that's easier. That's way easier. Hahaha, nice!
I don't think 我不認為
I've been able to talk in a full front lever. Good job, Derek. Wow. I also want to say that
I was actually reluctant to make this video. It's absolutely mind-blowing to me that the most hate I
got throughout my entire YouTube career is from showing science and facts about calisthenics.
People not only hate on YouTube comments but also DM me with the same old “train hard; be strong;
don't be not strong" messages on Instagram. Some people even make laughable "math" videos without
a single math equation to respond to me. I kinda pivoted away about talking math and physics about
calisthenics to avoid all the hate since after all YouTube is still a crowd-pleasing business.
However, since I recently stopped treating YouTube as a business, I have decided to resume
making this video because I know there will be people who will enjoy this kind of video. Lastly,
am I going to continue to train for the front lever? Yes, but I am not going to focus on it.
There are still a lot more calisthenics moves that are more achievable than the front lever for my
body type and I haven't achieved yet. I would rather be strategic and focus on those first.
Thanks for watching. Do you hope that the front lever hooks are on sale so you can try them out
first-hand and see how easy the front lever will become with the hooks? If you do, go
to the link in the video description below and let Fricitious Climbing know that you
really hope that the front lever hooks are on sale. I am sure if there are enough interest,
we may be able to convince Fricitious Climbing to start selling them. See you in the next video.