6: Hanging

The first thing I did after putting my squat rack together was to hang from the chin-up bar. This feels like a fundamental exciting movement in the same way that throwing something or picking something heavy up does.

I immediately noticed how much weaker my grip was and how much heavier I felt. My actual bodyweight isn’t vastly different from how it was before lockdown but it has increased slightly and I have certainly lost strength.

I read in a comment from Kit Laughlin on Emmet Louis’ Reddit AMA that he recommends hanging from a bar as a method for developing shoulder mobility - gravity pulls the shoulder deeper into “proper alignment”. I think he recommended people build up to a 2-minute hold (I have a feeling he might have even recommended 4 minutes, but that seems extreme!). I read more and saw Ido Portal’s write-up of his 30-day hang challenge. I think Portal comes across as a bit of a wanker but I liked that article.

You can hang passively, letting everything drop down and almost shrugging into it, actively, where you resist the drop by pulling your shoulders down away from your ears, or dynamically, where you swing around at the same time. All feel excellent, but it’s good to start by hanging actively.

I hung up there until I couldn’t anymore and then looked at my hands and noticed how soft they’d got.

So I will use hanging throughout the day to build my grip strength again, restore shoulder mobility and rebuild my callouses.