It’s time to reclaim our lost mobility, get rid of shoulder pain and develop shoulder strength, health and function.

Why? – The many benefits of just hangin’ around:

1. Shoulder/elbow/wrist health and reclaiming lost overhead mobility – Hands up who has experienced shoulder pain at some point in their lives? Overhead mobility is a huge problem for many of us, and missing ranges of motion in the shoulder are a predictor of future injury.

2. Grip Strength and endurance. Do you notice your forearms give out in workouts that involve a lot of pull-ups, toes to bar, KB swings etc? If you have not tried any prolonged hanging, its brutal on the grip, and a great way to build strength and endurance.

3. Lead up to pulling work, climbing and more advanced patterns. Hanging sits at the base of those patterns, just like standing does for walking. A deficiency in hanging work will become evident at some point, whether its shoulder pain or weakness in pulling strength, some get stuck early unable to develop even a single chin up. So developing hanging will improve pull-ups, toes to bar, muscle-ups and many other CrossFit movements.

The 3 week HANGING CHALLENGE brief will be posted on Sunday!

Watch below clip by Ido Portal.

“Hanging can promote optimal range and making use of the upper body as it was designed to be used. By simply allowing gravity to ‘do its thing’ in the passive work or “fighting it” in the active work – one can send a very intense adaptation producing signal into one’s structure. I wonder if we implement hanging work throughout our lives, from young age and into old age and without taking too large of a break what would be the results over the now lost ‘overhead reach’ range and shoulder injury rates.I suspect we would have little need to ‘stretch our shoulders’ any further. Of course shoulder integrity, elbow and wrist/hand/finger health can benefit tremendously from daily hanging as well.” – Ido Portal