It came to my mind that people might not now the importance of levers – nor what really are.

But first let me warn you:

There are certain articles out there that explains levers. Levers that you pull, levers on motorcycles, levers on doors, levers in secret chambers, security levers, brake levers, levers with different classes and levers with weight on – it’s even physics! Who would have thought of that. This article will not explain you any of the mentioned. Which reminds me that the title of this article should be; “Human Levers”. Oh well, another time – back to the world Up side Down

The Levers

An Introduction Article

When I’m talking about levers, I mean the human ones. Yes. Read one more time before continuing. The human levers are physical challenges – where the aim is to keep a straight body in different positions. If your understand what I mean from this point and on, jump to the next section – if not, continue reading.
Human levers are ways of controlling your body into lever positions with your arms. Obviously this is hard challenges and this article will not give you any tips on how to get there – talking about strength. However this article will explain the five most common human levers, what they are and basically how. From this point and on, I will stop calling them Human levers; I will just call them levers. Now go on.

Short break:
From this point on I will try to explain you the five human levers: The flag, Elbow lever, One armed Elbow lever, Front lever and Back lever.

The Flag

The flag is maybe one of the most impressive levers. Mostly because you use your body to hang in a flag position – in a way most flags don’t. Have you ever seen a flag in a horizontal straight line? Thought so. That’s why it’s so impressive.
The flag itself seems physically impossible since the body is in a horizontal position with hands attached on something – bars, stairs, chairs, poles you name it, they flag it.
It’s a common mistake that you have to be a superhuman in order to perform one. This is not right. The key elements to flags is Shoulder, Upper Back and Core muscles.
An example is if you forget activating your core, you will come in a position most flags really are – relaxed, meaning  just “hanging” there. In other words, and extremely ugly looking half way human flag with a fat chance that your feet is on the ground – meaning you failed and it’s really not a flag. Activate your core muscles for Otters Sake.

Elbow lever

This one looks awkward because of the lever position.  A friend of me described it this way; “Elbow lever? It looks like a person who failed an attempt on a normal push-up, ending up with his feet in the air and a ridiculous face matching the color of his sweater”. Actually, this is a pretty good description of the Elbow Lever. I will leave it with that.

One armed Elbow Lever

Same as above, just more impressive since your balancing on one arm, and got a even more ridiculous face matching at least two of the rubber faces to Jim Carry combined into one. Which brings me to the fact that what i mentioned last, is the impressive part here.

Back lever

Back lever is an awesome superman looking lever. The position is hanging horizontal from a obstacle with your face down, only holding with your arms. It looks quite easy, but I assure you it isn’t. Although is one of the easiest levers, it’s also one of the worst to fail on. Imagine you loosing grip – with your face down. For Otters sake, land on your feet. We don’t want you to look like “Harwey Two face” from the famous “Batman” series.

Front Lever

A bit harder than the back lever. Though it looks like it’s much easier. The front lever itself looks like the back lever, just with your face and rest of body, facing up. There’s not much to say other than that. Oh! I almost forgot. A perfect Front – and Back lever – is when arms are straight and the body in a almost perfect horizontal line.

The use of levers

The next questions – obviously – is what are they used for? Is there any point to adapt yourself overcoming these? Is it worth it?
yes , yes and yes.

The main reason that levers do help you is that all of them requires a lot of control. Core control and generally muscle control. A second reason is that all of em’ will help you in your regular handstand because the muscles you train are basically the same. Just different methods of using them. The third reason I’ll have to give you an example.
The planche looks a lot like the elbow lever, the main difference is the position of feet and the which muscles that is pressured. In other words practicing a elbow lever will help you gain more controll in a planche. And opposite. In fact the main difference between a elbow lever and a planche is that the Elbow handstand uses your elbows as a balancing point, contra your wings (latissimus) in a planche.