Halflay Front Lever Raises

After the hold of the same shape, never before it. A raise is harder than holding the same position, because you have to produce the shape through a range instead of resisting gravity at a single point. So halflay front lever raises sit above the halflay hold and above advanced tuck raises, and below the straddle, one leg and full versions of the same movement. Own a clean halflay hold first, then start adding raises to it.

Use the same standard at every rung: a hold you can repeat on an ordinary day, not one you scraped once when everything felt perfect. In practice that is a clean 10 seconds with the hips up and the shoulders still set, or 2 to 3 solid reps of the dynamic version. Chasing a much longer hold at an easy rung is the main reason people sit in the advanced tuck for a year. For raises specifically, 3 to 4 sets of 3 to 6 reps is plenty of volume.

Not because retraction itself lifts you, it does not. The lever is trying to drag your shoulder blades forward around your ribcage, and once that happens the lats lose the position they pull from. You retract and depress hard in order to end up neutral, not to reach some maximally pinched position. The tell is easy to spot: when retraction goes, the shoulder rises, the whole body drops, and people blame their abs for something the upper back just lost.

Straight, yes, but actively straight. Extend the elbow fully and hold it there with the triceps rather than hanging passively at the end of the joint's range. Sinking into hyperextension shifts the load off muscle and onto ligaments, and that is one of the quicker routes to an angry elbow in straight arm work. If your arms bend as soon as you pass horizontal, treat that as the shape being too heavy today, not as a detail to train through.

On this progression straddle comes after halflay, so halflay is the earlier of the two rungs. How it feels is a different question, and that depends on your hips. An athlete with a wide, open straddle takes real length out of the lever and finds straddle clearly easier. A stiff athlete with a narrow straddle can find the two almost identical, because a narrow straddle is barely shorter than a halflay. Train whichever one is honestly hard for you rather than the one a chart ranks higher.

Straight arm work loads tendon, and tendon adapts more slowly than muscle, so the pain usually comes from adding too much too quickly rather than from bad technique alone. Keep it to two or three sessions a week, change one variable at a time (either the shape or the volume, never both at once), and build up German hang and skin the cat work so the position is familiar before you load it heavily. Muscle soreness that fades in a day or two is normal. A sharp or lingering pain at the elbow or biceps tendon is not, and training through that one turns a few weeks off into many months.