Assisted Tuck Front Lever Pull Ups

No, and trying to is how people lose a year to a band. A band does not have its own place on the ladder, it borrows the next rung up. Use it one level above what you can already do unassisted, which here means you should already hold a tuck front lever on your own. If your best unassisted shape is a tuck and you are doing banded full front levers, the band is producing the position and you are not. Drop the thickness as you get stronger, and test the unassisted version regularly so you know what the band is actually worth.

The 30 second rule repeated in most tutorials is arbitrary, and it is why so many people sit in the same shape for a year. A more useful standard is a clean 10 to 20 seconds of the hold, or 2 to 3 solid reps of the moving version, done on an ordinary day rather than a perfect one. This exercise is reps rather than a hold, so around 3 to 4 sets of 3 to 6 clean reps with the hips staying level is a sensible dose. Progress when you can hit that same quality with a thinner band, not when you hit a round number.

Your upper back is not lifting you, it is stopping your shoulder blades being dragged forward around your ribcage. The position you actually want is neutral and depressed, but the lever pulls hard into protraction, so it feels like you have to retract and depress with everything you have just to end up neutral. Once the shoulder blades slide forward, the lats lose the position they extend the shoulder from, your shoulder rises, and your whole body drops. The retraction is not producing the pull, it is what makes the pull possible.

Straight arm work is a connective tissue problem, and tendon adapts much slower than muscle, so the usual cause is adding band thickness, reps and sessions all at the same time. Move one variable at a time and leave the rest of your week alone. Straighten the elbow but hold it there actively rather than hanging off the joint. Build hanging tolerance with dead hangs, German hangs and skin the cats first. Ordinary training soreness settles within a day or two, but a sharp, pinpoint elbow pain that arrives earlier each session is a signal to back off, not to push through.

Not the loaded work. This is a straight arm, tendon heavy pattern, and the long running elbow and biceps problems people report usually trace back to daily practice at high intensity. Two or three sessions a week with a day between them is plenty for most people. What you can do most days is the low load end: hangs, scapula pull ups, hollow body work and skin the cats, which build the position and the tissue tolerance without the same load on the joint.

It is almost always that the gap between rungs is too big, not that you need more sets. This exercise is one of the fixes, because instead of holding a tuck and waiting to hold an advanced tuck, you add reps and a band and get far more quality time in the shape. Two other things to try: build a half step by doing the next shape up with one leg extended and the other still tucked, rather than jumping the whole rung at once, and work out whether you fail at the shoulders or at the hips. If the shoulder blades slide forward first, go back to scapular work. If the hips sink first, your abs and glutes are the limit and the shoulders are fine.