Playing sports and keeping fit is a commitment that more and more people have to have a healthy life. There are more and more subscriptions to gyms and training videos and tutorials that are found on the Internet. The sport also leads to self-improvement that encourages you to improve your condition more and more to be healthy and feel good. That is why, if you are already a person with some experience in training and want to continue challenging your body, this article may interest you. There are exercises that are very popular but are not the most suitable for beginners, such as the Dragon Flags, an exercise that requires strength and endurance and is considered one of the most complete to work mainly the core and the abdominals.
In this article, we are going to tell you everything you need to know about the Dragon Flag exercise, how to do it and the muscles involved so that you can put it into practice and achieve a flat and toned abdomen and have more strength and stability in the core, something that results very important.
Table Of Content
1. What is Dragon Flag
2. How to make Dragon Flags
3. Muscles involved in Dragon flags
What is Dragon Flag
According to ATHLEAN-X™ How to do a Dragon Flag (GET KILLER ABS!)
The Dragon Flag was popularized long ago by the famous Bruce Lee. It is a type of exercise within calisthenics in which you work only with the weight of your body and try to achieve greater stability and body axis. Although there are many modalities and ways to do it, the basis of this exercise lies in supporting all your weight with your upper back and your arms, either on the ground or on a bar.
These two modalities, the bar and the floor are the two most common variants when doing the exercise. In this case, if you decide to do it using a bar, the exercise will be even more intense, since all the tension and body load will basically fall on the trapezius. However, in this exercise practically the entire core and abdominals are worked by having to maintain tension against gravity.
Its name, Dragon Flag (Dragon Flag) arises from the way you create with your body by having a curve that goes from the feet, at the top, through the hips and up to the head and arms. It can be done through static tension or up and down movements, which give more meaning to the name of flag.
How to make Dragon Flags
The Dragon Flag is an exercise that involves a great deal of strength and mastery of technique to avoid injury. That is why, before trying to do it, you should try the first phases of the posture and make it progressive, with practice each time you will be able to raise your legs a little more. Follow these steps to make the Dragon Flag With THENX :
- Place yourself on the floor face up with a bar, weight or support point right behind you, so that when you stretch your arms back you can hold on.
- With your legs bent and your knees hip-width apart, start rocking, trying to touch your face with your knees. In this way you already work the abdominals, the core and the legs.
- Once you have it quite mastered, go on to do the same but with your legs stretched out
- When you also consider that you have worked well on this step, move on to the next one. Straighten your legs, raise them to hip height, and lift your hips and part of your trunk to achieve a vertical position. In this way you have all the weight supported by the upper back and the strength of the arms, but, of course, you must have the legs, the glutes and the core, including the abdominal and back areas, in tension. to better distribute the effort and work the whole body well, without injuring yourself.
- Hold the posture high and tense for a few seconds.
- With this movement achieved, slowly begin to lower yourself towards the ground, maintaining tension at all times to control the movement and not fall abruptly, but rather support yourself little by little until your whole body rests on the ground.
- When you have mastered this exercise more, you can do it without reaching the top or resting your body completely on the ground, but going up and down several times in a row.
Muscles involved in Dragon flags
The Dragon Flags is an exercise that involves a lot of strength and endurance. There are many muscles involved that work intensely, so it is an exercise that is not recommended for beginners or at least not the full exercise or its more complex variants. These include the entire rectus abdominis, both lateral and central, the obliques, the lower back or lumbar area, and the buttocks. In addition, the whole part that supports the weight during the movement is also worked a lot. Some of these muscles are:
For this reason, it is important to train and build muscle in these parts before trying to do it and, whenever it is done, stretch and rest so that any type of injury does not brown.
Now that you’ve figured out how to do the Dragon Flag exercise, you may have to start doing it very slowly. Doing the Dragon Flag exercise with progression, little by little, is the most appropriate, especially if you do not have good basic muscles due to having been training well for some time. If this is your case, we recommend you read this other article on How to start doing calisthenics at home.