L-sit Progression

Workout 1 - designed to initiate L-sit training from the ground up.

Workout 2 - a more challenging routine for individuals nearing the achievement of a full L-sit.

To properly warm up for the L-sit, you simply need to warm up the muscles around the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, and knee joints by moving them around with intent or doing some named mobility movements. Then, do some warm-up sets for the main exercise. For example:

Light Mobility Drill: Shoulder Circles -> Shoulder Corkscrews -> Elbow Circles -> Wrist Rotations -> Hip Circles for a round or two with enough reps for you to feel them working.

Warm-Up Set/s: You can either do your main exercises or do some other relatively easy core exercise and do some reps or duration far from failure to use and warm up the same muscle groups.

Just make sure that whatever you do is just enough to work and warm up your muscles, not tire them, so you can perform your best in your working sets.

Choose a core exercise that has a similar movement pattern to that of the L-sit that you can do near failure within the specified rep range or duration. These can be core compression exercises like Reverse Crunches and Hanging Knee Raises

You simply have to choose or modify an exercise for you to be able to do that within the specified rep range to build both strength and muscle mass on the main muscle groups involved.

Determine what your limiting factors are in your L-sit training, and then choose exercises for those limitations. These typically include core compression strength (and hip flexion strength), leg extension strength, scapular control (depression and protraction), wrist mobility, and other lagging muscle group/s like the triceps.

In case of severe lack of hamstring flexibility, train your hamstrings with resistance exercises like doing standing single-leg curls while wearing an ankle weight. The hamstring tightness is due to weakness so it is better to strengthen it than just stretch it regularly.

The template recommends 2 to 4 sets for the main exercise. Leaning toward the higher end — 3 to 4 sets — tends to be more beneficial if you are relatively new to training. Research shows that less-trained individuals voluntarily activate a smaller percentage of their available motor unit pool — even at maximal effort — leaving more motor units unstimulated per set.

Additional sets provide more high-effort recruitment opportunities before fatigue accumulates and begins limiting motor unit recruitment. As neural efficiency improves with training, each set becomes more effective at reaching higher-threshold motor units, and 2 to 3 sets may be sufficient.

This is a strength-specific progression where training frequency matters — more sessions mean more neural practice opportunities. Keeping each session manageable enough to recover fully before the next one is what sustains that frequency. While 1–2 RIR is generally better for this reason, it's still useful to go to task failure (0 RIR) early on when you don't yet have a feel for what near-failure is, to avoid undertraining.

With this, you should compensate for it by ensuring other training variables are optimized for recovery, like nutrition, sleep, stress management, and overall training volume. But then, after getting the hang of the feeling of going until failure, it's better to stay in 1 - 2 RIR and use going until failure sparingly.

For strength progressions like this, a relatively high training frequency is beneficial — more sessions mean more practice opportunities, which primarily drives the neural and motor pattern adaptations behind skill-based strength gains. Fatigue is an unavoidable byproduct of training, so the goal is to keep each session's effort manageable enough to recover fully before the next one. Every other day or 2–3 times a week are both reasonable options, the latter providing a slightly longer recovery window between sessions.

When you find it relatively easy to do, instead of increasing the volume and risking being under-recovered, considering you do it with a high frequency of 3+ times a week, make it harder by simply choosing a more challenging variation or exercise that you can manage properly.

Once you've unlocked a solid floor full L-sit, great work! From there, you can start experimenting with the L-sit and combining it with other exercises for added fun and benefits. You can also choose to work towards harder variations of the L-sit, such as the V-sit, which simply involves decreasing the angle from your body and feet, and ultimately, the Manna.