Bent Vs. Straight Leg Toes to Bar
Toes the bar are a challenging core, lat, and cardiovascular system exercise commonly found in functional fitness workouts. But when you watch athletes perform them, you’ll notice that some perform this exercise with straight legs and others by bending their knees. In this video, gymnastics expert Pamela Gagnon breaks down Bent Vs Straight Leg Toes to Bar to help you understand which technique will work better in your workouts.
Performance Plus Programs to help you reach your toes to bar goals:
Bent vs. Straight Leg Toes to Bar Recap:
- Which is best depends on the individual athlete’s muscle and flexibility strength and limitations
- Both patterns go through global extension and flexion patterns as the athlete moves back and forth between reps and allows us to create power to perform reps rapidly.
- Both require lots of lats, hip flexors, and core strength
- The straight toes to bar technique requires a lot of posterior chain mobility. Athletes performing this method should be able to touch their toes with straight legs while on their feet because that is essentially what we are doing in the hanging position
- Athletes with less flexibility will be more likely to need to do the bent knee toes to bar method over the straight leg technique
- The bent knee method has the athlete bend their knees as they bring their toes toward the bar and then kick the knees straighter to make contact with the bar. This reduces hamstring flexibility demands
- Cycle time of reps is more dependent on how aggressive an athlete’s arch swing is than which T2B version they perform
- The straight leg variation requires a bit more quad work over core but these aren’t wildly different
