The Hanging Challenge - Q&A
A few weeks ago, after starting The Hanging Challenge , I went live with my good friend and colleague, Louise Pegg who I've worked with for over a year now. We talked about the benefits of hanging, why we are doing a challenge, and how you can get involved.
LP: I think this chat will be as beneficial for me as it is for everyone else! So Monday this week you started your four-week Hanging Challenge, which I’m also taking part in! What is it that’s prompted you to start this challenge? Why are we doing it? Because it's really tough and we’re only on day three!
SK: There's three things that really prompted me. The first was that a few friends of mine started complaining about their posture during the first lockdown and how much of an issue it had become for them. These are fit people who do a lot of training and had never complained to me before about their body. And suddenly poor posture became an issue.
I know we're all getting older but this was a bit soon! Most of my friends are younger than me and so I'm usually the one that complains about posture and joint problems and stuff like that. So I thought that this complaint was becoming a more widespread thing. Now I'm not the only one with posture struggles and it got me thinking about how I could help. What could I offer to help with these issues?
Hanging came to the front of my mind because it has really helped me. I had huge posture problems in the past, and I still have, but I'm working on them more diligently than before. I had a long history of just sitting and hunching without even realising it.
You can see that if I take my arms overhead, I can't quite touch the wall behind me. Yes, I can touch the wall with a massive arch on my back but if I try and hollow out my spine and make it vertical I’m quite far away from the wall. Normally you’d think; “just get your arms overhead, how easy”, well it’s not for everyone!
LP: I can attest to that! It’s not!
SK: Don't get me wrong, for some people it's a piece of cake, but it's a mixture of lifestyle, training, genes and stress. It’s a mixture of things but mostly it's lifestyle. It’s easier for you if you've been spending a lot of time swimming or if you’ve been hanging regularly throughout your life.
My second reason for starting this challenge is because over the past five years, hanging has helped me to straighten myself out quite significantly and I wanted to share this benefit with everyone.
And thirdly, my impetus came from observing people in class and also the people that I train outside of class. Watching their overhead mobility and their overhead range in general. It's a surprising challenge for a lot of people to just be vertical.
LP: I first heard of hanging about a year and a half ago when an osteopath prescribed it to my partner because he has arthritis issues in his back. So is it a new thing? Because you just said you'd been doing it for about five years but I’d literally never heard of it before.
SK: No, it's not a new thing in the sense that we were designed to hang. Just like we were designed to run. Not in the same proportion, but it should be something that we do easily without really thinking. But we've ignored it. I'm not exactly sure why. I think some of it has to do with health and safety. Like in parks, not letting people hang there and potentially injure themselves and so on. But in answer to your question, no, it's not a new thing. It's just culturally a little bit pushed to the side
LP: So is posture the main benefit of hanging?
SK: Posture is a big benefit, but it’s also about opening your body up. If you think about the effect of gravity on your bones over time, each bone presses onto the next one and onto the next one and so on. So the space between your bones becomes smaller. For example, in the shoulder the end of your collarbone and the top of your arm can get compressed and pushed closer together over time. Hanging creates some space between them and allows things to move more freely.
It’s the same for your spine. If you have been sitting long hours or if you aren’t that active, your vertebrae tend to press on to one another. The same goes for people doing a lot of back squats. Hanging is a very simple way of decompressing everything. It prevents aches and sometimes helps to prevent the need for surgery, especially in the shoulder.
Sometimes people are prescribed surgery to flatten out the end of their collar bone so that it doesn't press down on their shoulder and it's actually been shown that this can be prevented with regular hanging.
LP: That's insane. The fact that people are recommended to have surgery over doing something so simple. Hanging is the prevention rather than the cure.
SK: I think this is actually the case with a lot of mobility-related issues. For example, for the foot there's a lot of cases where wearing the wrong shoes over a long period of time can cause your toes to form into a funny shape. And you might think, what can I do? Do I need to surgically alter them? No, it's lifestyle that we need to look at first.
LP: Who is hanging good for? Is it good for everybody or are there certain people that shouldn't do it?
SK: If you've just had your shoulder dislocated, it’s definitely not the time to hang. Also sometimes with hypermobile people they need to focus more on strengthening rather than stretching. For example, when we do passive hangs to stretch things out, if you were hypermobile and I was training you I would focus a lot more on active hangs to create tension.
We also have to remember that we never train through pain. We train to the point where it's a challenge but if there's pain, don't do it at all. If you start off fine but then start feeling pain, you drop it straight away.
LP: Remind me how long we’re building our hangs up to? Was it three minutes?
SK: I'm not expecting people to be able to do a three-minute hang unbroken. I've never come up near that. I've not even hit two minutes. I'm expecting people to accumulate that in a day. As long as it's time spent on the bar. If you want to play around, swing... I don't really mind. It's normal to want to explore what else you can do whilst hanging.
LP: So for anyone who wants to join in, can you just talk a bit about the challenge itself and how it's going to be building up over the 4 weeks?
SK: So we started on Monday with 30 seconds and again, for some people 30 seconds is a lot.
LP: It is!
SK: That's completely normal. If you go from no experience, or not having done any hanging the week before, or the year before and suddenly you're told to hang for 30 seconds... that's a long time. So you can do 3 sets of 10 seconds, for example, and rest in between.
LP: So it’s more about time on the bar rather than an unbroken hang?
SK: Exactly. We're not going for max effort or how long you can go. Although it is good to challenge yourself, it's more important to me that you spend time working on it. It’s a bit like your step count. No one's ever going to say to you “Just walk and see how far you can go. Stop when you hit Essex!”. It's more about accumulating steps during the day and it’s the same principle with the Hanging Challenge.
LP: So over the four weeks we’re adding five seconds a day?
SK: Yes. It's going to suddenly get quite hard. You will hit a point where you just can't hold anymore and that will be your current max. It’s perfectly fine to drop there.
Also if full-body hanging is just a bit too much at the moment, you can put your feet on the floor and that way, you're only holding the weight of your upper body. For some people that might be more than enough to create the stretch that we’re looking for.
LP: What are your top three hanging tips? I know one of them that you gave to me was to use liquid chalk, which I think helped. Have you got any other tips for anyone who wants to get involved?
SK: That wouldn't be my top tip but chalk does make a big difference. Either liquid or normal chalk is fine.
My top tip would be to just build it up gradually. So if hanging for five seconds is enough for you right now, do 5 seconds six times a day to start with. I'm more interested in seeing you progress.
Up until about five years ago, I had never hung in my life. You know how they say; “Oh, I haven't hung since I was a child”. I didn't hang as a child!
LP: You just swam in the ocean!
SK: I did! But hanging was completely foreign. I don't think I'd ever hung until five years ago. Or maybe I had but definitely not consciously or as part of my training. If you're someone who did a lot of gymnastics as a child then consider yourself lucky. I was never that person.
For some people I want to say it's built into their training - people who do gymnastics or people who do a lot of obstacle course races like Tough Mudders. It’s already built in!
LP: I think that was the biggest shock for me when I realised that I didn't actually know how to hang. There was a monkey bar obstacle at the local playground and I literally fell off at the first one!
SK: It's definitely a skill.
LP: A question from Carla here, she's asking what should you do with your neck when you're hanging? I guess it’s because you're feeling quite a lot of tension which would be an unusual feeling.
SK: The hangs that we do at the moment in the challenge are just passive hangs. So you literally just relax your whole body and the only thing that's working really hard is obviously your arms and hands because they have to support you there. The rest of you can just relax. You will find that your shoulders will come up to your ears and your neck sinks down. You shouldn't hold any tension in your neck and you should try and relax it as much as you can. If you want to look up or look down, it’s totally up to you, but ideally relax your neck.
LP: How can people get involved in this? Where can they sign up to the challenge? I know that every day you're giving encouragement and sharing tips and hints on how to build up and how to get the best out of your hang. So how can people join in and see all of this encouragement?
SK: To sign up, you can go to my Instagram profile and click the one link in my bio, which then clicks through to a whole list of links.
I think the Hanging Challenge is link number two. Scroll down the page and somewhere in the middle there's a form there where you put in your name and email. You will get one confirmation email straight away and then another straight after. The second email will explain what we will do in the challenge that week. So every day it's broken down by how much time we spend hanging and then you join in.
For the encouragement and group side of things, we also have a little community group on Mighty Networks where you can join the conversation, post your hanging pictures, share anything you found difficult, ask any questions etc. WIth this challenge, it’s all about doing it together. We don’t want anyone to be taking part in silence!
LP: It’s fun! My partner, my baby son and I all went out to the playground yesterday - luckily, there were no children in there because it might have been a bit weird, but we were hanging from the swings and it was actually really fun to do together. Like a challenge between us.
I think this is a really good one to get involved in. I'm also hoping that I'm going to grow a little bit taller by the end of this challenge!
SK: Exactly. Why do you think I'm in it? Thank you Louise, see you soon!
The May Hanging Challenge is now completed but stay tuned for upcoming events by subscribing to my mailing list.