If you are skinny fat and building strength, one of the biggest hurdles you will face sill be motivation. Even if you gain muscle and strength you will never bulk up, which makes it really difficult to stay motivated.
One of the greatest builders of motivation is doing something that most people can not do. Another of the great motivation builders is to do something that looks really impressive. The "human flag" is one such exercise that ticks both of these boxes.
When I was in my twenties I used to be able to do the human flag, it was easy enough and I thought everyone could do it. Now that I am older, and weaker, I tried to do the human flag again and found it impossible to do. It was so hard that I wondered if I would ever be able to do this again.
I did a little research, and it appears that very few people can achieve human flag, and most who can are incredibly athletic monsters. I had no idea, I used to think if someone skinny like me can do it then everyone could do it. Turns out I was wrong.
The fact that very few people can do this made me really want to do human flag again. It is impressive to see an athletic person do this, it is mind boggling to see a scrawny bloke like me do it. This made me want to train and do this again. We got a set of monkey bars for the kids a few years ago, so I have somewhere to train without having to leave my yard.
I did some more research, and most of these athletic monsters trained for hours each day, for between six months to two years before they could achieve this. Hmmm, I don't have hours each day to train, and I didn't want to wait two years to be able to do this again.
I set a timeframe of six weeks to achieve this, and got stuck into training. I only trained for a few minutes every day because I didn't have much spare time. I just made sure to train every day. Every single day. No excuses.
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| Human flag - a bit wobbly and my feet are too low but I was getting there |
Most people assume that lack of core strength is what stops them from being able to do human flag, but most people have enough core strength. Most people lack the upper body/arm strength required for human flag.
I have been doing a lot of push ups so thought I had the upper body strength to pull this off, and I thought that I lacked the necessary core strength. I was partly right.
I lacked upper body strength AND I lacked core strength. I also lacked leg strength for some reason.
This was going to be tricky when I don't have more than a few minutes each day to train. My six week timeframe to achieve this was starting to feel overly optimistic...
To increase my core strength I started to do side plank dips. I used straight arms so my shoulders and arms would be in a similar position to where they would be in the human flag. Doing a few of these each day, every day, and I built core strength pretty quickly.
Straight arm side dip planks helped tremendously, but my legs and my arms were still too weak.
I was already doing a lot of push ups, and I started doing chin ups each day. I was only able to do five chin ups at the start. After a few weeks was able to do ten and eventually got up to about twenty in one set. I need to write a blog post on how to increase the number of chin ups, because it is different to building numbers of something like push ups. I am told that you need to be able to do 10 chin ups with proper form to have enough strength to do human flag. I am not sure if this is true or not but getting stronger upper body has to help.
Chin ups helped build my shoulder strength and bicep strength, but I also needed more triceps strength. It is absurd how much your triceps are used in human flag.
I started to do diamond push ups. These hurt my triceps a lot, so were clearly making them stronger. Together with regular push ups and chin ups my arms gained the strength that was needed to do human flag.
Strangely enough my legs were also weak. I have some leg weights from back when I used to do kung fu. I put them on for a few hours each evening after work. I even tried to do the human flag while wearing my leg weights and tried to do some chin ups while wearing the leg weights. This made my legs strong enough to do human flag. Chances are your legs are already strong enough, I am not sure why my legs are so weak, but they were weak so I made them stronger.
As well as all of that, I also got in and tried to do the human flag every day. We have monkey bars for the kids so I would go down after work each day and quickly give it a go on each side. As I got stronger I got closer and closer to being able to successfully pull off this exercise. Sometimes I could hold it for 1 or 2 seconds.
My aim was 3 seconds, which felt like a lot more than I was capable of. I had set my timeframe and had to achieve it, so I kept training.
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| Human flag training - almost there! |
After five weeks of training, I was almost there! This video shows how close I was:
A few days later I successfully did the human flag!
It took me a little under six weeks of daily training, but I was eventually able to do the human flag on the pole of a street sign in front of some strangers.
I overheard comments that were seemingly in awe. I couldn't quite hear what they were saying as I was struggling not to pass out at the time. Someone far larger than me and rather athletic looking saw what I did and then tried to do the human flag, he failed miserably, he couldn't even get his feet off the ground. That's what I was after.
If I can do this in just under six weeks, then you can do it too! Don't feel bad when you first try and fail. Without failure there can be no progress. Try to remember that many (untrained) larger and more athletic people have also tried this and they have failed. The difference between failure and success is training.
If you are skinny you should train to do the human flag.
There is something nice about being able to complete an impressive exercise that few people can do. There is something even nicer when people twice your size give it a go are unable to do it.
Do prochnost strength training, try harder, be more!
