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In this tutorial I will show you how to do back lever .
The set up of the back lever consists first in getting to a face down hanging position with your arms extended behind you back. To reach this position you must get your hips over your head in a back roll motion. From there you can approach the lever in two ways: you either stretch your legs out from a tuck position, which is the easiest way, or you start with a fully extended stance from the upside down position and you bring your body horizontal, which is harder but surely more elegant.
In order to get into a good horizontal alignment, you must lift your head to avoid hunching of the upper back, and press your feet together to stabilize your lower body. But most importantly, you must obtain the protraction of the scapulae by pressing down your arms towards your back as hard as you can. Why is scapular protraction important? If a force is pulling the arms backwards, as in the case of the back lever, it will cause the scapulae, or shoulder blades, to move closer to one another and towards the spine. This is called scapular retraction. As you can see, this position of the shoulder blades leads to an excessive arching of the back which will put too much pressure on the intervertebral disks as well as creating an incorrect and akward posture in the back lever. To avoid this, you must push the arms to the opposite direction, driving the shoulder blades away from the spine. This is called scapular protraction and will help stabilize the trunk and keep the back, and also the rest of the body, more straight and aligned.
Let now have a look at the progression for the back lever. First of all, I would strongly suggest to use gymnastic rings to start out. As I’ve mention earlier, they’re safer to use than the bar, and will allow an easier grip.
The first step is to master the skin the cat exercise. If you feel uncomfortable with rolling upside down in the hanging position, start practicing the exercise with your feet on the floor. This will help you get the feel of the movement and assess your range of motion safely. Once you get more confident, bring the rings higher so you will be in the full hanging position without touching the floor. Begin by keeping a tuck position then straighten your legs once you build up enough strength and core activation. And finally you can do the same on a pull up bar, which is slightly harder because of the reduced space to pass the feet up through the arms.
From here, the most logical progression is to gradually increase the body length to the fully extended position, so to increase distance between the pivot point and the center of mass. Starting from the tuck position with your knees close to your chest... we move to half body length with the legs stretched down towards the ground. Following we lift the feet up and move the knees away from the chest. This is the advanced tuck position. Then we bring the body to three quarter of the full length. And of course, you can do the same progression using the straight pull up bar .
If you find yourself stuck at some stage in this progression, a good idea is to use some assistance to get past your plateau. It will also help you get the feel for the exercise in the fully extended position as well as strengthen the same body parts that are used in the back lever.
The training and conditioning for the back lever has to focus on improving those basic requirement I’ve discussed earlier. The first point is to maintain shoulder mobility through proper stretching. Here is a stretch you can do using rings to get the body accustomed to backwards extension of the arms that you’ll have in the back lever.
The skin the cat is a very good exercise, not just for the back lever specifically, but also in general to attain full range of motion in the shoulders, core activation, basic ring strength as well as control and coordination.
And as I’ve said earlier key to your progress in the back lever as well as in most gymnastics type exercises, is shoulder strength. A good way to work this is with dips. Start doing it with just your bodyweight, then progressively add weight as you get stronger. You can do them on both parallel bars or gymnastic rings, although rings has the advantage of adding instability which will make the exercise harder.