The human flag is a very impressive-looking move in calisthenics. I never really thought
about training for it since Overcoming Gravity ranks the difficulty of the human flag and the
front lever as the same level. However, recently when I chatted with my strong brother, he told
me that based on his experience, the human flag is actually way more achievable than the front lever,
and he believes I will be able to learn it fairly quickly. Coincidently, recently I started to work
out at a gymnastic gym where a Swedish ladder is available. Therefore, I decided to start learning
the human flag with the aim of holding it for 5 seconds. On day 1, I had no idea what I was doing.
I found it difficult to balance, and I also found it difficult to push myself up. It certainly
didn't feel as easy as my brother described. When I woke up the next day, my shoulders were
incredibly sore. It felt as if some muscles of the shoulders that had never been activated got fully
activated. I decided to sit down and derive the math and physics equations for the human flag to
figure out what exactly the strength requirement should be in order to achieve this move. I am
going to skip the math and physics derivation for this video, but comment below if you want to see
the in-depth math and physics breakdown. According to math and physics, the human flag should be very
achievable given my strength level. I just need to get used to the movement and wire up the neural
connections. I also decided to watch as many human flag tutorials on YouTube as possible.
There are three key tips that I discovered. The first key tip is that I should turn the grip of
my bottom hand into a supinated grip, which is universally mentioned in all tutorials. The second
key tip is only mentioned by Calisthenics Family among all the tutorials I watched.
The tip is to grab the outer side of the bar where the bar connects to the vertical pole, instead of
the middle part of the bar. It makes perfect sense because this guarantees the hands to be perfectly
aligned, so the body won't spin around randomly due to any misalignment of the hands. The third
tip is only mentioned by Chris Heria among all the tutorials I watched. The tip is to bring the chest
out when pushing with the bottom hands, which will allow the muscles to engage a lot better
and thus generate more pushing force. In terms of the training idea, there are 3 main lines of thought.
The first line of thought is using the resistance band, but the problem is that the assistance comes
from a direction that is different from the force generated by the arms, which causes confusion on
the body. It's unlike the scenario of the pull-up, where the assistance from the resistance band is
in the same direction as the force generated by the arms. The second line of thought is training
tuck variations, but the problem is that the tuck causes the body to be on a different
vertical plane, which causes a lot of unnecessary balance issues. The third line of thought is doing
dynamics, either positives or negatives. It's hard to solidly say whether training statics
with dynamics in general should work or not, but personally, I am skeptical of it. Fortunately, I
didn't have to worry about which training idea to go for. When I applied the right technique in my
next training session, I was strong enough to hold the straddle human flag right away. However, my
full human flag attempts were not good enough yet because my hips appeared to be sagging. Initially,
I thought maybe my hips were sagging because my core was weak. However, after thinking about it
for a few days, I suddenly remembered Domnik Sky saying that core is rarely the issue when training
for the front lever. Even though it might appear to be so, it's almost always the retraction. I
thought the same idea was very likely to be applicable to the human flag. The real
issue was most likely that I needed to push even harder with my bottom arm. In the next session,
I stopped paying attention to my core and focused on pushing as hard as I could, and this happened.
Since the human flag was relatively easy for me to learn,
I decided to train the other side as well for completeness. How, how the heck did he do that?
If you are relatively new to calisthenics and are bored with the push-up and the pull-up,
and you are looking for a cool skill to learn, in addition to the muscle-up and the handstand,
you should definitely consider the human flag. It's way easier than skills like the planche,
the front lever, the back lever, and the handstand push-up. Don't be afraid to learn
it because Overcoming Gravity ranks it erroneously difficult. This is not just my personal anecdote.
Even the math and physics equations agree with me. Thanks for watching. If you enjoy my videos,
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