Why We Should All Hang? Analysis of Ido Portal's Hanging Challenge to mobilize, stabilize, and strengthen your shoulders.

We continue to explore the little-known natural human movements that have enormous benefits for health, joint mobility, the ability to move freely and the longevity of our bodies with a new challenge from Ido Portal , the movement coach behind Movement Culture, called:

The Hanging Month .

After having analyzed in detail The 30/30 Squat Challenge of Ido Portal , in which one must get used to sitting in the Deep Squat position 30 minutes a day, every day for 30 days, we approach, this time, the other engine of the human body: the shoulder .

The movement we are going to analyze is what we call hanging in English, the art of hanging . We will see the challenge that Ido Portal offers us, the possible benefits for the mobility and health of our shoulders but also see how this movement could be one of the most powerful tools in healing shoulder injuries .

If you are suffering from any kind of shoulder pain, pinching, locking, weakness in the shoulder girdle or rotator cuff… and/or mobility issues with overhead lifts, this article can help you understand, relieve, and potentially eliminate your shoulder pain.

You can also have perfectly healthy shoulders and find elements in this article to strengthen them and progress in your sport , especially for climbing, CrossFit, gymnastics and parkour.

Very good reading the movements.

What is “hanging” and why is it so important?

Hanging or suspension is defined as any movement in which you hang from a bar with your arms fully extended .

So it is not about the pulling movements, such as pull-ups, that we saw in the 7 fundamental human movements .

A natural human movement?

Even if we cannot really call suspension a fundamental human movement, it is nonetheless a natural, organic, instinctive movement . I will not use the word “primal” but almost.

We all remember those moments of play in the playground as children during which we hung on to the bars, we went back and forth while walking on the Monkey Bars by first passing one hand after the other on the same bar, then directly passing by every other bar.

And that was class!

Now, to say that physiologically, we are designed to move like monkeys, perhaps not given the shape of our bodies.

On the other hand, it seems coherent, at the anthropological level (we have a common ancestor with primates) and even in the sense of evolution, that we are designed to cling for a long time to a branch, a rock, a wall to avoid predators for example...

Well, that's not the topic of this article, but it's often interesting to use this lens to analyze the loss of mobility and motor skills of the modern human animal.

So I would say that suspension is one of the fundamental functions of the human body.

A movement forgotten by modern fitness

It is customary for me to address in my articles, the small paragraph that teases the world of modern fitness .

I repeat it every time, the idea is not to stigmatize or point the finger at Fitness as being the absolute enemy that must be avoided like the plague. Far from it!

I am simply using these few lines to raise awareness among readers who are interested in a different approach to physical training and the relationship with the body, no longer based on short-term aesthetic objectives but on the desire to exploit one's physical potential in its entirety .

When was the last time you saw someone in the gym hanging? Or working on their shoulder girdle with exercises like push pulls, shoulder circles, shoulder pulls, static holds…

If you are familiar with gymnastics or calisthenics, these movements are very common and are often used as progressions to reach more advanced positions such as Front Lever, Back Lever, One-Arm Front Lever…

These athletes are among the strongest, most resilient athletes with an incredible range of technical and expressive possibilities.

The “Beach Muscle” approach (development of the most visible muscles) tends to remove this feeling of competence and creativity in favor of hypertrophy and the race for aesthetics.

Let's not forget that the body is designed for movement. The less we use it, the more we lose it!

Training through play

Far from the approach to physical development through the juxtaposition of exercises, the establishment of protocols and training structures, the use of numerical metrics (number of repetitions, rest time, frequency, volume, etc.),

Hanging is, above all, playing.

Humans, like all animals in the animal kingdom, learn most effectively while having fun. By incorporating this type of training, we reconnect with a youthful approach to physical training.

We have fun, we learn, we challenge ourselves, we develop our neural network, we gain self-esteem, self-confidence, we connect with others and we reconnect with ourselves and with Nature (if we train outdoors for example)...

Precious benefits that we don't talk about enough, in my opinion, and which make us have a better life experience in this magnificent vehicle that is this human body.

Before looking at the more technical, more tangible benefits of hanging on health, longevity, rehabilitation and even the healing of our modern, battered shoulders, let's look at the different types of suspension exercises that exist .

The Different Types of Suspension Exercises

It is customary to classify suspension movements under 2 broad categories: passive suspension and active suspension .

We will nevertheless add the third little one to stay in the Ido Portal challenge: dynamic suspension .

1. Passive Hanging

Passive suspension exercises can be performed by most people who train I would say.

If you haven't done pull-ups in a while, or handled weights like barbells, kettlebells, or played with rings, or you never put your hands on the ground, simply hanging from a bar can potentially cause you problems.

Being able to keep your body weight simply suspended by gravity is not so easy if you don't have a physical activity habit that involves your grip, arms, and hands.

If you've been doing calisthenics or gymnastics for a while, you already know that our hands are very fragile due to our modern lifestyles that prevent us from conditioning them. After a few sessions, you'll quickly develop calluses on your hands and fingers.

This is a sign that you are becoming a solid mover ^^

Don't be discouraged, however, if passive suspension is difficult at first. Simply start with short durations , such as a few seconds, and then increase them as you get used to it.

If you ever suffer from shoulder pain, minor discomfort that recurs frequently, or habitual discomfort in your arm movements, then you will quickly benefit from these movements .

How to properly perform the Dead Hang (passive suspension)

Find a bar at a height high enough to let your whole body hang in the air , keeping your body straight, preferably without having to bend your legs.

If you ever have trouble with the suspension, you can choose the height of the bar so that your feet touch the ground . Then, it's up to you to adjust the weight you let hang by helping yourself with the support of your feet on the ground.

As you hang (hands shoulder-width apart), you'll notice your shoulder blades want to come together. Just try to keep them apart to enjoy the stretching sensations through your arms and throughout your body.

Instructions:

1. Grip the bar with an overhand grip (palms facing out)
2. Place your hands shoulder-width apart
3. Let the body relax and become limp
4. Keep the rib cage down
5. Keep your elbows fully extended
6. Keep your shoulders apart

2. Active Hanging

Here we enter the realm of movement with exercises and movements to develop strength, scapular control, core strength and engage the back muscles and stabilizers.

You can build a strength workout with the moves you'll see in this section or add them to your existing strength routine.

If you have problems with your shoulders, pain, you feel instability , or you can't really understand how to use your upper back area properly, or correctly activate the muscles of your shoulder blades, or you can't distinguish between scapular retractions or protractions (for example for Kipping Pull Ups in CrossFit), going up, going down, turning...

Active suspension will work wonders for you.

A little personal story : I have injured my rotator cuff in both shoulders numerous times during boxing training or physical preparation sessions for combat sports.

Active suspension has helped me completely remove pain , unlock movements I had blocked due to injuries and even strengthen my shoulder so that I feel confident, stronger and more efficient in my punches and elbows.

Of course, it didn't happen in a week or two, but adding these exercises into my daily routine at those times, and if not, at least 2 to 3 times a week, even for just a few minutes, plays a major role in healing shoulder injuries.

We will see in detail the benefits of suspension on shoulder rehabilitation a little later in the article.

For active suspension movements, here are some rules to follow to extract the maximum benefits in terms of strength and body control.

Instructions:

1. Do not bend your elbows. Very, very important!
2. Keep your ribcage down and flat on your stomach. Do not arch your back excessively.
3. Stay in the vertical plane, without tilting forward or backward.
4. Favor the pronation grip.
5. Do not hesitate to place your hands a little wider than shoulder width apart for greater comfort.
6. Perform the movements slowly and in a controlled manner. Never run up!

A good way to progress and develop strength quickly is to focus on the “negatives” : that is, slowing down the eccentric phase of the movement (when you come back down).

Try to fight gravity by braking as much as possible on the descent. Aim for a good 10 seconds on the descent.

3. Dynamic Suspension

To put it simply, dynamic suspensions are a combination of passive suspensions, active suspensions and the use of momentum .

This time we are moving beyond the scope of exercises in the sense of movements with limited amplitude and action plan, to enter the domain of movement training itself.

Some examples of dynamic suspension:

• Brachiation
  A form of locomotion that mimics the movement of long-armed tree-dwelling monkeys , moving from branch to branch (or from Monkey Bar to Monkey Bar if you're less adventurous). Some examples are the walks of the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the gibbon, etc.
• Swinging
  You swing your body weight from one arm to the other using momentum like pendulum movements . You don't necessarily need to cover a distance like with Brachiation.
• Release and Catch
  The movements that we often see in Parkour or Ninja Warrior in which we let go of a bar for a few seconds ( floating in the air ), before grabbing another one.
• Street Workout
  The sport that perfectly represents this idea of ​​dynamic suspension is the competition version of Calisthenics. The goal is to create and chain together different figures on the bar . For example, we chain together jumps, twists, static positions, pull-ups... It's very dynamic and very impressive.

All these techniques are the combination of holding a static position for a short time,

with a moment in which we need to activate our muscles, our joints, modify a grip... to create inertia ,

and finally, a moment in which we use this initially created momentum to move towards the next combination of movements...

And so on.

Now that we have clearly defined what “hanging” means, let’s look at some of the benefits of hanging before tackling the Ido Portal challenge so that you too can enjoy these benefits for your body, your movements and your health.

The Benefits of Hanging Out and Why We Should All Do It More Often

We'll quickly present the obvious physical benefits of hanging from a bar and being able to move your body against gravity,

to then talk in more detail about the little-known benefits on shoulder rehabilitation, health, regeneration, joint mobility... and even longevity

The “classic” benefits on the development of physical qualities

Let's do a quick scan of the most obvious gains:

• Increased range of motion in the shoulders for overhead movements
• Improved grip
• Development of strength in the shoulders, shoulder girdle, arms, forearms and back in general
• Decompress the spine (passive suspension in particular)
• Improved posture (consequence of the previous point)
• Development of strength endurance (hands and forearms) very useful for climbers
• Stretching the arm and back muscles
• Strengthening the rotator cuff muscles and the stabilizers of the scapula (shoulder blade).
• Improved core strength and strengthening of the abdominal muscles

Transferability to other fields

Now for the less obvious, yet equally important, gains, are the qualities that can be transferred to other sports and daily physical activities.

We don't think about it enough, but it's not just climbers, CrossFit, Street Workout or Parkour athletes who can benefit from the advantages of increased grip, endurance and shoulder strengthening.

Examples include transferability to grip combat sports, sports in which one needs to manipulate objects or other bodies, and movement phases in which one needs to manipulate one's body against a surface or a stationary object (floor, wall, vertical bar).

A deficiency in suspension work will become evident at some point in your technical and/or creative development and you may remain stuck at a physical plateau without ever being able to escape.

Although it may not seem obvious at first glance, suspension training pays huge dividends even for improving your handstands, developing your muscle mass, or even acquiring more complex skills like one-armed pull-ups.

More body awareness

Finally, I would like to mention, as usual, the slightly more metaphysical part on bodily consciousness.

Suspended work creates a real awareness of your body in space , improves your ability to represent your body in movement and track the different imbalance positions of your shoulders, your back, etc.

It's truly a superpower once you've incorporated it into your training and you'll quickly realize it when you try to place your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu techniques, perform your Capoeira Flow, or work on your Handstands and your acrobatics (tumbling).

If you follow the Movement Culture guys at all, you've probably seen the videos of Roye Goldschmidt, Ido Portal's number one student who took hanging to the limit.

After years of training, Roye is now able to generate a wide range of movement combinations and has an incredible capacity for creation and improvisation .

A true artist capable of creating poetry in motion .

The (little-known) benefits of shoulder rehabilitation. The work of Dr. Kirch.

This section deserves a full article on the subject, but I will try to be concise.

Several years ago, when I was a professional boxer, I discovered a book that changed my life and my perspective on shoulder injuries and how to effectively rehabilitate them.

At that point in my life, I had already beaten my shoulders well and I continued to pound after each injury like any good self-respecting martial artist (hahaha I'm kidding)

This book is called Shoulder Pain: The Solution and Prevention by Dr. John Kirsch.

In this book, we discover how we can ALL fix our shoulders with a very simple, very effective protocol that can be applied to the vast majority of everyday injuries or injuries related to our sporting activities.

It's surprising how simple it is, but Dr. Kirsch has decades of medical practice and thousands of patients who have completely healed from injury, disability, pain, frozen, dislocated, frozen shoulders, permanent pinching, people with tears after accidents, and even avoided surgery .

Without going into technical details, the idea can be described as follows: hanging daily to reshape our shoulder (shape and position of the acromion).

An interesting read that goes into detail about shoulder anatomy and goes against traditional thinking to complement the bodyweight suspension work I'm proposing here.

A book to add to the list of useful books in the Library of Movements.

A long presentation that I hope will have taught you useful information on one of the major functional movements forgotten by the modern world and its improving character on your physical potential, your health and your longevity.

Without further ado, here is the challenge proposed by Ido Portal of Movement Culture to raise awareness about “hanging” and how you can start your suspension practice.

The rules of Ido Portal's Hanging Month Challenge

In an effort to promote suspension, Ido Portal has created a 30-day challenge .

Similar to his 30/30 Squat Challenge , which we analyzed in detail, he presents here a simple challenge to get used to hanging.

There's only one rule: hold onto a bar for a cumulative period of 7 minutes every day for 30 days or an entire month.

Simple, right? 7 minutes is a load of crap! When do we start? Haha

I'll let you think about the idea of ​​staying suspended for 7 minutes non-stop, with the tension in your forearms, your shoulders pulling, your hands clenched on the metal bar... Bliss 🙂

As with the Deep Squat challenge, you can (and should) spread the different hanging exercises throughout the day rather than trying to do 7 minutes of hanging at once.

Personally, I don't think this challenge is accessible to everyone.

It requires a physical and mental condition that most people without any training habits cannot develop.

However, the exercises to begin the suspension are excellent for an introduction to this area of ​​movement and to begin to fix the shoulders in complete autonomy .

I suggest implementing:

1. Dead Hang: Passive hangs
2. Scapular Pulls: raise and lower only by contracting the shoulder blades, without bending the elbows
3. Scapular Protractions / Retractions: moving the shoulder blades together and away from each other.

With just these 3 exercises, for small series of 5 repetitions at the beginning, and subsequently 10 to 15 repetitions or around thirty seconds to a minute for passive suspension, a little every day or every 2 days,

The results will be fabulous and you will already be able to enjoy the benefits we talked about above.

In this sense, I think we should all reinstate suspension in our daily lives.

To go further

I can only applaud the work of Ido Portal and Dr. Kirsch on suspension and its benefits on health, longevity and human movement.

I have experienced it and it was a great success for me and for my students, and so I can only invite you to take part in this experience, which I hope will be just as positive for you.

So try the little exercises I suggested above and if you're feeling adventurous, join Ido Portal's challenge, The Hanging Month to test it out, see your progress in strength or the rehabilitation of your shoulders.

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below this article or ask me any questions you may have about suspension or shoulder pain/injuries.

Once that's done, here are some avenues to explore, a list of the most useful suspension movements , in my opinion, to continue exploiting your physical potential:

• One Arm Pull Up.
  Start strength training to achieve one-armed pull-ups. This is a great way to develop unilateral strength, correct left-right asymmetries, improve core strength, and develop a more complete body movement ability.
• Front Lever and Back Lever.
  Two famous Calisthenics movements that I love because they allow you to develop incredible strength endurance to maintain static positions (body parallel to the ground). It's an excellent way to develop core strength and a shoulder girdle that really protects the spine.
• Skin The Cat
  One of my favorite gymnastic movements for core strength and shoulder mobility involves rotating your shoulders completely (arms still extended and attached to the rings) until your body is vertical again, feet facing the ground but shoulders in full internal rotation. If you see it for the first time, it's the kind of movement where you think, " No, that's not human!"

That's a bit about my 3 favorites.

I plan to do a tutorial on these three on my Nomadslim Movement YouTube channel so be sure to subscribe now to get notified as soon as anything is released.

Don't hesitate to dive into the world of natural movement and joint mobility thanks to the other articles on the Blog, the Podcasts and of course the online training courses,

to help you begin your adventure towards greater freedom and physical autonomy.

Nomad Slim
Founder of MOUVERS