Half Lay Front Lever

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In the traditional progression sequence, the half lay front lever is the final progression position before reaching the full front lever. Although having your knees bent 90 degrees pretty significantly reduces the difficulty compared to the front lever, the half lay still requires a high level of pulling strength. It also requires more core activation compared to easier progression positions.

The Basics

The half lay front lever is primarily used as a strength exercise. It is classified as a horizontal upper pull movement. It is more generally classified as a upper pull movement. Since it involves significant activation of multiple muscle groups, it is considered a compound exercise.

Form

Set Up

• Grasp the bar with an overhand grip slightly wider than shoulder width apart.
• Option 1: Inverted Hang (Easiest)
• Tuck your legs to your chest
• With straight arms, pull yourself to an inverted hang
• Straighten your legs, keeping your knees bent 90 degrees
• Engage your back and abs
• Lower yourself until your body is horizontal
• Option 2: Ice Cream Maker (Harder)
• Do a pull up, but stop at the top of the rep
• Straighten your legs, keeping your knees bent 90 degrees
• Engage your back and abs
• Lean back and straighten your arms at the same time so that your body ends up horizontal and arms straight
• Option 3: Raise (Hardest)
• Straighten your legs, keeping your knees bent 90 degrees
• Engage your back and abs
• With straight arms, raise and rotate your body until it's horizontal

The Hold

• Keep your arms straight
• Keep your thighs in line with your torso and knees bent 90 degrees
• Keep your shoulderblades pulled down and slightly back
• Engage your abs, pulling your hips to your ribs so that your back is straight
• Your upper back should be rounded and your lower back straight
• Think about pulling your hands down and in towards your body

Common Mistakes

Arching Your Back

Allowing your back to arch and legs to drop down is a sign that you need to improve your core strength. Work on actively pulling your hips to your ribs to maintain a straight line.

Piking at the Hips

While piking at the hips makes holding the front lever easier, proper form calls for maintaining a straight line. As you try to hold your front lever, pay attention and make sure your legs are staying in line with your torso.

Bending Your Arms

Just like piking at the hips, bending the arms makes holding the front lever easier and is not proper form.

Fully Retracting Your Shoulder Blades

Unlike some of the other mistakes, this one actually makes holding the front lever harder. You want your shoulder blades to be slightly retracted as this puts your back muscles in the most advantageous position.

Additional Info

Height and Weight

How difficult the half lay front lever is going to be for you depends in large part on your height and weight. You've likely held a long object, like a broom or even a barbell. If you've ever tried to hold it parallel to the ground, you probably chose to hold it in the middle so the weight was balanced on either side. This is because if you hold more towards one end, the other end is pulled down more and you have exert more force to stop it from rotating.

This is essentially what is happening in the front lever. So if you're taller, it's like you're grabbing the object farther from the center, making it even harder to hold.

As for weight, take the broom and the barbell again. You can probably hold a broom parallel to the ground from one of the ends, but the barbell is obviously a different story.

You can check out our Lever/Planche Moment Calculator to see how hard the front lever and some of its easier positions will be for you.

Progression

As the final progression position in the traditional sequence, the half lay front lever is about 89% as difficult as a full front lever. This is a fairly significant difference and many people have a difficult time transitioning from half lay to full. For a more in depth guide to working towards the front lever, including different strategies for transitioning between positions, check out this article.

Related Articles

• Front Lever Progression | A Comprehensive Guide: Everything you need to know (and more) about how to go from a beginner to holding your first full front lever. This guide has every progression position, optimal hold times, variations for advanced trainees, as well as personalized standards and progress tracking.

Related Exercises

Reviews

Progression Performance Standards

As part of the Fitness Score System, many exercises have performance standards that are used in calculating your score in a particular component of physical fitness. Progression exercises often don't have individual performance standards as they are primarily used to modify the difficulty of the full move. To see progression standards for the Base Exercise, click the link for it in the Related Exercise section.

Muscular Endurance Standards By Body Weight

The tables show the reps or isometric hold times (in seconds) needed to reach each of the muscular endurance ranks at different body weights. The reps on the table are based on world records, ratios, and the average time needed to attain each rank. To see personalized standards for every exercise, check out the Muscular Endurance Standards page.

The amount of weight used to test for muscular endurance of some of the exercises is a percentage of body weight. The percentage was chosen to be memorable and to require a Novice to Intermediate level of strength so that most trainees could reasonably use it while not having to do an excessive amount of reps.