Tuck Planche
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The first and easiest of the progression holds for the planche, the tuck planche isn't necessarily easy. It requires a decent amount of pushing strength as well as straight arm strength.
The Basics
The tuck planche is primarily used as a strength exercise. It is classified as a horizontal upper push movement. It is more generally classified as a upper push movement. Since it involves significant activation of multiple muscle groups, it is considered a compound exercise.
Form
Set Up
- Place your hands shoulder width or slightly wider apart on the ground
- Fingers can be facing forwards, out to the sides, or backwards
- Keep your legs tucked beneath you
- Face the inside of your elbows forward and keep your arms straight
- Push your shoulders down towards your hands, protracting your shoulder blades
- Your shoulders should be directly above your hands
Execution
- Keeping your arms straight and legs tucked to your chest, shift your body forward so that your shoulders move forwards and your hands are positioned beneath your core
- Keep your shoulders tight and engaged and your shoulders protracted
- Engage your biceps to stabilize your elbows
- As your weight is shifted to your hands, lift your feet off the ground, keeping your legs tucked to your chest
- Hold the position
Common Mistakes
Bending Your Arms
Keeping your arms straight is an important part of the tuck planche. Your arms should be completely straight, stabilized and held in place by your biceps. If you're bending your arms during the planche, you're likely attepting too hard of a progression.
Shoulder Protraction
A key part of the tuck planche is correctly setting your shoulders. Be sure to keep your shoulder blades protracted and depressed so that your shoulders are in a safe and stable position to hold your weight.
Additional Info
Rounding Your Back
Ideally, you would be able to maintain a neutral core during the tuck planche. However, tucking your legs closely to your chest makes that difficult. In this case, rounding your back is entirely acceptable. As you move on to harder progressions, be sure to focus on keeping a neutral core.
Hand Positioning
Performing a tuck planche requires you to hold all of your body weight on your hands. This can put significant stress on your wrists, and depending on your wrist mobility, certain hand positions may be more comfortable.
- Forward: Facing your fingers forward puts the most stress on the wrists, but allows you to use your fingers for leverage which makes the planche slightly easier
- Sideways: Facing your fingers sideways makes the planche more difficult, but puts less stress on the wrists
- Backward: Facing your fingers backward puts the least stress on the wrists but is the most difficult and more directly works the biceps
Paralletes
While you most certainly can train the tuck planche without paralletes, they can be quite helpful. Using paralletes makes learning and building your planche strength easier. They put your wrists in a more comfortable position and the extra height makes the tuck planche easier to train.
Height and Weight
As the difficulty of the tuck planche comes largely from leverage, your height and weight significantly change how hard it will be for you. For more info on this, check out the Lever/Planche Moment Calculator page.
Related Exercises
The most common or basic version of the given exercise.
Alternative exercises are good replacements for the given exercise. They develop the same fitness component and/or muscle group but do so in a different way that may work better for you.
Similar exercises work some or all of the same muscles, but are different from the given exercise in a way that doesn't make them as good of a replacement as the alternative exercises.
Opposing exercises target the antagonist muscles or the opposite movement pattern of the given exercise. Useful for finding agonist/antagonist exercise pairings to reduce rest time and speed up workouts.
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.
