Tuck Front Lever

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Even though it's the first progression hold for the front lever, the tuck front lever isn't necessarily easy. It requires a decent amount of pulling strength as well as straight arm strength.

The Basics

The tuck 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)
• Pull yourself into an inverted hang, kicking into it if needed
• Tuck your legs to your chest
• Lower yourself until your torso is horizontal with the ground
• Option 2: Ice Cream Maker (Harder)
• Do a pull up, but stop at the top of the rep
• Tuck your legs to your chest
• Lean back and straighten your arms at the same time so that your torso ends up horizontal and arms straight
• Option 3: Raise (Hardest)
• Tuck your legs to your chest
• With straight arms, raise and rotate your body until it's horizontal

The Hold

• Keep your arms straight and legs tucked to your chest
• Keep your shoulder blades 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

Bending Your Arms

Bending your arms makes holding the position significantly easier and is not considered 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 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 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

The tuck front lever is the first and easiest progression hold for the front lever. It is about 67% as difficult as the front lever, which still makes it a fairly challenging move. For a more in depth guide to working towards the front lever, 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.

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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.