Toes-to-Bar
oec:toes-to-bar
An advanced calisthenics exercise where the athlete hangs from an overhead bar and flexes the hips and spine until the toes make contact with the bar.
Generated by gemini-3.8-flash from the sources below. No person has checked this record. Don't rely on it for safety.
Also called: Toes to Bar, T2B, Hanging Toes to Bar
How to do it
Setup
- Grasp a secure pull-up bar with an overhand, shoulder-width grip.
- Hang with your arms fully extended and engage your shoulders slightly to avoid hanging passively in the joint capsule.
- Keep your legs together and maintain a slight active hollow-body posture.
Movement
- Engage your lats to pull slightly down on the bar while forcefully contracting your abdominals and hip flexors.
- Raise your legs straight upward toward the ceiling, rounding your lumbar spine as your pelvis rolls upward.
- Continue raising your feet until both toes touch the bar simultaneously between your hands.
- Lower your legs back down under control, resisting the descent until you return to the starting dead-hang position without swinging.
Breathing
Exhale forcefully as you curl your hips and raise your feet to the bar; inhale steadily as you lower your legs back to the start.
Cues
- Pull the bar toward your hips as you lift your legs.
- Curl your pelvis up, don't just lift your thighs.
- Control the descent to kill momentum.
Common faults
- Excessive swinging or relying purely on momentum instead of core strength.
- Reset to a strict hollow body at the bottom and lower the legs with a controlled eccentric tempo.
- Only flexing at the hips and failing to round the spine, which limits abdominal recruitment.
- Focus on rolling your pelvis upward toward your chest to achieve full lumbar flexion before touching the bar.
Safety
- Ensure the pull-up bar is securely mounted and has sufficient overhead clearance.
- Stop if you experience sharp pain in the front of the shoulders or lumbar spine.
Muscles
Joints
- Lumbar spine: Flexion
- Hip: Flexion
- Shoulder: Isometric stabilization
- Fingers: Isometric stabilization
Details
- Movement
- Spinal flexion
- Modality
- Calisthenics, Strength
- Mechanics
- compound
- Force
- pull
- Laterality
- bilateral
- Kinetic chain
- open
- Level
- intermediate
- Equipment
- Pull-up bar
- Record
- Repetitions
- Load
- bodyweight
Related
- progression of Hanging Leg Raise
- progression of Hanging Knee Raise
Sources
- wger: Toes to bar, by florian.bussmann (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
This record: CC-BY-SA-4.0.