Most people who drop into a forearm plank know the shape they are aiming for, a straight board from crown to heel, and most of them still end up with a sagging middle, a rising tailbone, or a neck wrenched upward toward the ceiling. In a single short tutorial, Charlie Follows takes that familiar pose apart from the ground up: how the forearms are placed, where the eyes go, what the shoulder blades should be doing, and how the pelvis and legs complete the line. The video runs under two minutes, but it is built the way good form instruction should be, one structural decision at a time, each one setting up the next.
The plank is a static hold, which makes it deceptively unforgiving. Nothing moves, so there is nowhere to hide a misalignment. Follows opens with an admission that frames the whole clip: "If no one's ever shown you how to do forearm plank properly, then let me help because I know there's some confusion about what the body should be doing." The confusion he is describing is less about strength than about sequence. People tend to build the pose from the middle outward, squeezing the belly first and hoping the rest follows. His approach runs the other way, starting with the base and working toward the heels, which is the logic of a building going up from its foundation.
Follows gives two legitimate options for the base. The first is parallel forearms, which he demonstrates by holding one forearm and spacing the arms apart before opening them out. He is candid about the trade-off: "Keeping the arms parallel like this is usually harder for beginners." His recommendation for anyone who is struggling is the second option, clasping the hands together and pressing the pinky-side edge of the hand into the mat. That small change matters. The pinky side of the hand, the ulnar edge, becomes a broader, more planted contact point, and the clasped grip effectively locks the two forearms into a single unit. For a student who wobbles, a more stable base is usually the first thing to fix, because every correction above it depends on the floor being reliable.
Notice that the choice is not a ranking. Parallel forearms are the version that reads as the purer form to many people, but Follows is making a teaching point: pick the base that lets you build the rest of the pose correctly. If the parallel version forces your shoulders to collapse and your hips to drop, the clasped version is the more honest starting point.
The instruction is one line long, and he flags it as critical: "Then gaze down. This is super important. So many people look up and you're going to get a bad neck if you do that." Keeping the head in line with the spine is a basic principle of any plank, and lifting the chin is one of the most common ways the upper body escapes the line. A raised head pulls the neck into extension and tends to pull the chest down with it. Gazing toward the mat keeps the cervical spine neutral and reinforces the long line he is trying to build from the top down.
This is the heart of the video, and it is where Follows is most specific about feel. Once the base is set, he says, "push from the elbows through to the forearms. You're looking to protract the shoulder blades." Protraction means the shoulder blades slide forward and around the ribcage, away from the spine. The opposite movement, retraction, pulls the blades back and together.
He contrasts the two directly. Retraction, he says, is where "I'm sinking into the shoulders." Protraction is the "doming action where you're pushing away," and he describes the upper back rounding gently outward, the dome he points to on camera. The payoff is stability. As he puts it, this "will make you feel so much more stable." The sensation of sinking into the shoulders is the feeling of collapse; the dome is the feeling of the floor being pushed away from you. It is a subtle distinction, and it is one many people only feel once someone names it.
With the upper body set, Follows moves to the legs: "extend one leg at a time," rise onto the balls of the feet, and create "this diagonal line with the body." The image he gives is a steady slope, "from the shoulders down to your heels," rather than a plank where the hips peak up and then drop sharply to the heels. That spiking hip is the most common fault in the pose, and he acknowledges it directly: "if you notice that your hips are spiking up, use a mirror if you're not sure."
The correction he offers is a posterior pelvic tilt, which in plain terms means tucking the pelvis so the lower back flattens rather than arching and the hips do not ride above the line of the body. He ties the cue to the glutes and legs: "Imagine you're squeezing your glutes and you're squeezing your legs together and you're trying to keep something squeezed in between your legs. That is what you're aiming for." The image is an effective one because it asks for engagement through the whole posterior chain at once, rather than a single isolated muscle, and it gives the student something to feel rather than something to adjust by eye.
Read as a list, the four cues look like a checklist. Read as a sequence, they describe how the body builds stability in layers. The base comes first because it is the floor everything else rests on. The gaze comes next because it sets the neck in line before the rest of the spine is stacked. The shoulder protraction then engages the upper back so the trunk is held up actively rather than hung between the arms. Only then do the legs and pelvis come in, closing the line from shoulders to heels. A student who skips straight to squeezing the glutes without a stable upper body will usually find the hips simply moving elsewhere.
Use the video as a self-check rather than a full program. Set up the base first, decide whether parallel or clasped suits your current strength, and hold the pose with your eyes on the mat. Then run the sequence in your head: push the floor away through the forearms, feel for the dome in the upper back, and check the diagonal from shoulders to heels. A phone propped to the side, or a mirror as Follows suggests, will show you whether the hips are staying in the line. Practice the cues one at a time before you try to hold all of them together, and expect the posterior pelvic tilt to take the longest to feel natural.
