Planche Push-up - Week 0

In this blog series I want to document my journey of building up to a full planche push-up. I was introduced to this exercise by my workout buddy and we thought it would be a challenging goal to work towards together. Our main inspiration is Lazy Town Sportacus; supposedly he was challenged by a friend to get good at calisthenics and then he simply just went and got good at it.

I'm a regular gym goer but especially in the past few years have focused mostly on strength. Given my height and weight a planche push-up is probably a little ambitious. My gym buddy is also on the taller side and he's not been working out seriously for that long, but we're both excited to see how far we can push ourselves.

Preparation

I started with some online research the old fashioned way. I googled "planche push-up" and found a few articles, some reddit posts, and a bunch of YT videos. There is a lot of information out there, but it seems that people have very different opinions on how to approach this. Some people swore by hand stand push-ups and said to never do dips, others swore by dips and said to never do hand stand push-ups so overall it's not very helpful.

Another challenge is that most planche push-up guides start with the tucked planche, but I'm pretty sure we're nowhere near that level.

In the end I came up with a bunch of exercises that seem relevant and should provide us with good fundamentals from which we can build up to more advanced exercises.

All of these exercises were mentioned the most often among the various sources I found and they seem like a good starting point for building our fundamentals.