The dead hang is an excellent exercise to work on your grip strength, improve your shoulder health, decompress your spine, and it can make you 8 inches taller. Well, at least most of that is true.
Do you keep hearing about how hanging from a bar fixes every problem you’ve ever had? And while it sounds compelling, you are a bit skeptical.
In this post, we give you 7 real dead hang benefits that are a good reason to include this simple — but not easy — exercise into your workout routine. We also tell you why gaining height is none of them.
Table of Contents
1. Greater Shoulder Mobility
Having adequate shoulder mobility is essential, not only for athletes, but for everybody.
Your shoulder is a very complicated joint designed to allow movement in nearly every direction. However, there is a golden rule you have to follow to maintain this remarkable ability: Use it or lose it.
Chances are, you don’t give your shoulders the attention they deserve. And you probably never appreciated them until a nagging pain or injury appeared and your movement is suddenly restricted.
Hanging from a bar is a great and simple way to regain your shoulder mobility. It stretches a lot of muscles around your shoulder joints and really works on your overhead mobility.
The dead hang stretches your latissimus and pectorals and is especially effective when you relax your shoulders and whole body into the stretch. To maximize the mobility benefits of hanging, let your shoulders rise up to the level of your ears. This variation of the dead hang is called a passive hang.
2. Stronger Shoulder Stability
Stability is equally important to healthy shoulders as mobility. You have to be able to keep your shoulder in a stable and safe position in everyday life and during athletic movements.
In order to train your shoulder stability by hanging from a bar, utilize the active hang. Engage your shoulders by pulling your shoulder plates down and squeezing them together. By doing so, you pull your body up and hold it in place with your shoulder and back muscles, rather than relying on the passive tension of your joints and ligaments.
This engagement not only strengthens the muscles around the shoulder and scapula but also teaches your body how to maintain proper shoulder alignment under tension, an essential skill for injury prevention and enhancing overall shoulder health.
3. Relieves Shoulder Pain
In modern life, where most activities involve having your arms in front of you — typing, driving, and texting — you rarely extend your arms overhead. It’s probably even more rare that you experience the benefits of hanging.
As John M. Kirsch, MD argues, that’s exactly the reason for a lot of shoulder pain and injuries: A lack of use, especially of hanging. Your ancestors were climbing and hanging from trees all the time, so your body is designed to hang too.
In his opinion, not hanging leads to less space in the shoulder joint over time and causes impingement, rotator cuff tears, and frozen shoulder syndrome. By hanging from a bar regularly, you can reverse these effects — reshaping your acromion — and become pain-free.
If you are suffering from shoulder pain, check out this post to learn more about the Kirsch method of treating shoulders issues and the underlying anatomy.
4. Spinal Decompression
Another dead hang benefit is spinal decompression. Sounds fancy, but it’s essentially about giving your spine a much-needed stretch. When you hang, gravity gently pulls your body downwards, creating space between your vertebrae.
This natural stretching can help relieve pressure on the discs and nerves in your spine, contributing to overall spinal health and potentially easing back discomfort. It’s like a gentle, elongating pull that counteracts the compressive forces you experience from gravity during daily activities like sitting, walking, and standing.
If you’re interested in decompressing your spine by hanging, you can read more here. You’ll also discover how you can maximize the decompression by using a simple assistance tool that not many people know about.
Myth Busting: Hanging Increases Height?
If you searched for the hanging exercise and spinal decompression online, you might have read that the dead hang increases height permanently. This is false.
Over the course of eight hours during the day, in which you are upright, your body loses about 0.65 inches (16.4 mm) of height. The reason for this is gravity compressing your spine slightly. However, when you lie down horizontally over night, your body regains that height again.
By hanging from a bar you can also reverse the effects of gravity and you will be just a little bit taller afterwards. But this height (re)gain is also very short-lived. As soon as you step back on the floor, gravity goes back to work on your spine and decreases the space between your vertebrae. This effect of compression is fastest immediately after you let go off the bar.
A permanent height increase by hanging from a bar is not possible. No matter for how long and how regular you hang to decompress your spine, your body reverts back to normal quickly.
5. Improves Core Strength
A stronger core not only looks great but also enhances functional mobility, balance, risk of injuries and decreases low back pain. But did you know that sit-ups and crunches are actually not the best way to train your core. Your core is essential for stabilizing your spine and keeping it in a neutral position. Crunching teaches the opposite.
That’s why isometrics are superior core exercises. The active hang is an excellent way to work on your core stability. Bring your shoulder blades down and keep the tension. Point your toes and slightly bring your legs up in front of you. You are now in a hollow body position.
Maintaining this position requires constant core engagement, promoting strength and stability.
6. Better Posture
Do you catch yourself constantly slouching and unable to remain in an upright position for even short periods of time? The dead hang can help you improve your posture.
By training your shoulder mobility, stability, and core strength, hanging from a pull-up bar covers some bases when it comes to better posture. However, it doesn’t cover all bases and it will not be enough to turn you from a chronic sloucher into a model of perfect posture.
For comprehensive posture improvement, it’s essential to integrate other exercises and habits that address your entire body’s alignment and muscle balance.
7. Grip Strength
Did you know that grip strength is beneficial not only for lifting weights in the gym and for everyday activities like opening jars or carrying groceries. Grip strength is also an important metric of longevity. For the elderly, the ability to hold onto something with force can prevent a fall that is potentially deadly at old age.
Because it is very hard to build strength when you’re old, it’s important to build it when you’re young and try to keep as much of that while aging.
Listen to what longevity expert Peter Attia, MD has to say about grip strength at 7:50 minutes into the video:
Obviously, hanging from a bar challenges your grips. A lot! During the dead hang, the muscles in your hands and forearms are working extremely hard to hold on.
Getting Started With the Dead Hang
Performing the dead hang is more challenging than it looks. As a beginner, we recommend you start like this:
- Pick an object that is placed above your head and which you can safely hang from. A pull-up bar is ideal.
- Grab the object with your hands at shoulder width or slightly wider.
- Use an overhand grip. The palms of your hands are facing forward.
- Hang on using just your hands. If this is too hard or painful, you can place your feet on the floor or a stool to assist you.
- If you are performing an active hang, keep tension in your whole body by pulling your shoulder blades down and flexing your core. Alternatively, if you are performing a passive hang, try to relax your body as much as possible and let your body sink down into a stronger stretch.
- Keep your head leveled above your shoulders.
- Do three sets of 10 to 30 second holds. Progress as you get stronger.
There are a lot of nuances and different variations when it comes to hanging. If you want to know more about using different grips, grip widths, objects you can hang from, and tools to make it easier or more challenging, we’ve got you covered. Our ultimate dead hang guide teaches you every hanging variation and trick there is and tells you exactly which ones to pick, depending on the dead hang benefits you want to reap.
