All round enthusiastic dude @alvinauh made an offhand comment on one of my daily training reports that I should teach him some ninja skills… which, ah, made me realise that was the whole reason I was excited about this whole platform. I wanted to teach all the people all the things...

The first of the things, a super necessary skill is called the lache.

Hey, question, is a lache even necessary?

American Ninja Warrior almost always requires a lache at some point in their obstacle courses. Ultimate Beast Master also requires a lache or 3 in the first stage of their competition too. Spartan Races and Tough Mudders often do have monkey bars or something where a lache would be useful to get through quickly.

Why do these courses love laches so much?

A few people criticise American Ninja Warrior for it’s overuse of laches, but it makes sense to me, firstly, it’s not a skill that rock climbers traditionally use, so it helps reign them in a little bit. Secondly, it always looks cool on television, especially when someone misses and spectacularly falls in the water.

Why don’t these shows just marry laches already?

Oh, it’ll happen… the whole reason I’m putting this post together is to score an invite.

So, what even is one?

Fair question. Back in the day you’d get one through the mail, but these days you might just receive an e-mail or a Facey invite. People whippin’ up websites is super common now. I really am waiting for someone to put together a bloackchain invitational system so my acceptance can be immutable…

What? No, shut up, no, what? What is a lache?

As an avid viewer of all of these shows, it always strikes me as weird when someone doesn’t know how to move their body when they’re hanging. I get that it’s not super common in most disciplines, but if you’ve watched any of these shows once you should know it’s a thing. Who are all these people popping onto these TV shows (which are super super hard to get on to by the way) without knowing how to lache?

A lache is basically moving your body from one spot to another, while hanging.

A lache is a type of movement you can do while hanging… to move your body from one spot to another. Say you’re traversing some bars (yeah, nah, metal ones) and they’re too far to monkey bar (moving with one hand on each bar) across… then you’d have to do a lache.

You smash out a lache by swinging your body backwards and forwards, until you’ve built up enough momentum so that when you let go of the first bar your body flies forward so that you can catch the second bar.

Lache forward swing.png

You can lache from an absolute dead hang, by building momentum with your feet and hips. You thrust your hips forward when swinging forward and really throw your hips backwards on the back swing.

Lache backswing.png

At the very apex of the back swing (you’d want to be nearly parallel to your bar) you’ll need to regrip your hands… so you let go for a tiny second and re-catch the bar. This puts your hands in the right position for the forward swing.

You have to time your release to the bar carefully. Too early and you’ll skid into the ground, and too late you’ll fly up and not gain any distance. You basically want to release your hands when your body is at a 45 degree angle (if the two bars are at the same height, you’d need to adjust if they’re different heights). This 45 degree angle should give you both the height and the distance to grab the next bar.

Instead of just letting go, you are instead going to want to throw the first bar away.. as in, that kind of motion with your arms and shoulders propels your body forward AND by giving your torso a bit of an extra kick, you’ll adjust your angle for a better landing. You’ll approach your target bar more upright because your shoulders are propelled forward.

Lache catch.png

THAT SOUNDS HORRIFYING!

To successfully land a lache, you actually want to catch the bar at your chest-height. You don’t want to catch the bar with outstretched arms, this will make you feel like your wrenching your arms out of their shoulder-sockets. Catching the bar at chest height gives you all the distance from your chest to the top of your hands to control your landing.
Once you’ve made the catch, you can then build up momentum again to repeat to the next bar.

I still don’t understand, couldn’t you add at least one Instructional video into this post?

I guess I could, it is like, the first thing in this post… although I should mention that there is a clip from Australian Ninja Warrior in there. The Australian link for the full video is here, and the international link for the full video is here.

Also, here is a link to a 8 foot lache I punched out a while ago.

Any different techniques?

For sure… I like to let go of my two hands at the same time, and catch with both hands together… but other people really like to use more of a 1, 2 movement with their hands. They kind of add a monkey bar traverse movement into their lache. It gives them a little bit more control, but it does twist their body in the movement, so I’m not really a fan… personally.

There is a technique that I actually can’t do yet, where you let go of the first bar way later than usual, which gives you a much higher arch… and you catch the second bar as your falling downwards. You can’t go as far with this technique, but it sets you up perfectly to grab the bar in a perfect arc which then carries through to any subsequent bars… if you do it smoothly, you could fly through an unlimited number of bars really efficiently.

With my technique, I’d need to generate momentum and power on each individual bar.

Is there any reason why a normal person would ever need to learn this?

Of course! Laches are essential to every day life… trillions of people use them every minute of every day. I’ll lay some examples on you, why don’t you see how they fit?

Say, ah, you live in a volcano and the floor is lava… obviously you’ll burn your feet if you walked around, so you set up an elaborate series of bars for you to get around your home. Laches.
Or, you’re a nurse at a busy hospital, but afterhours you also work as a fully qualified parkour teacher in a gym equipped with bars to train laches on. Seriously, you probably wouldn’t even get that second job if you couldn’t do a lache.
A super common situation is you get peer-pressured into a Tough Mudder by Greg at work, and you do it… but you really want to do it slightly faster next time… laches are literally invaluable in this scenario, unless you can run faster.

If I had any questions, would I be able to leave said questions in the comments at the end of this post?

I can’t make any promises… but I promise to not flag all of the legitimate questions. Like every other teacher who absolutely destroys brains with mega knowledge, I’m not really into engaging questions that continue a conversation, I just want people to tell me if this was a nice post or not.

Thanks heaps for reading and/or watching... super super super appreciate it.