Yes the arm is so much better reaching down! I'm gonna post a video of baby poler Vanessa teaching myself this move and tag you in it bc I think the nuance of the positioning of the contact points is super important in marchetti more than flexibility and you're doing the same positioning error I was doing back then.

Hiiiiii, idk about drills, but I believe your hands/body placement are backwards and that might make this a lot easier. I'm usually the "flier" (person starting on the ground in this scenario) so whenever I set up a trick I think of it as my torso and the bases torso have to face each other like we're going in for a hug. Then for the arm placement I put my hands up like I'm giving them a high five and we grab each others forearms. This is picture of me and my friend getting this correction at pole con and my brain conceptualized it as high fiving. The concepts are still the same even with basing from your inverted position go in for the hug, then high five as flier.

jamimah agree with Stephanie Tallant that the grabbing position will be different for everyone depending on your body and arms (I have T. rex arms). However the higher up your leg you grab the more leg flexibility you will need bc you're essentially pulling your leg into more of a split and similar to a jade split one of the main contact points is your thigh/hip squeezing between the pole which seems unlikely to be able to create that contact point grabbing at the knee (at least for me). One thing I learned because I have short arms (which causes the same problem as thick thighs) is pulling with the top arm and turning my chest towards the inside leg which allows you to rotate that shoulder more and buys you some extra length with that inside arm that's trying to grab the pole. Then once I grab the pole I open my chest towards the ceiling.

Ohhhhhhh yes that makes a lot of sense, I was trying to pull with my arms to counteract that shift which clearly was not working and was straining my arms so glad I tabled it 🙃I'll try again tomorrow after work

This is one of my favorite moves 😍It looks like your arm is flipped the wrong direction, you need to internally rotate your shoulder so that the hand can reach down and grab the pole below your leg. I'd try the move completely laying on the floor first, lift the hips as if to chopper, hook outside leg, then reach the arm around the inside leg to grab the pole below all while keeping your back on the floor so you don't have to fight against gravity and/or spin and see if you can get in the position (picture attached of what I mean, I'm grabbing the pole under my leg here). Then I'd try static, then to spin. Spinning in that little ball to set up marchetti, you get A LOT of momentum which makes the move harder than it already is. Full disclosure, I taught myself this move from IG in my BS (Before Steph) era though so 🙈🙈🙈

Susan Papp Mlodzienski the flying cobra videos are literally the hardest of ALL of Steph's flexibility videos IMO (except for maybe the cocoon stretch one) and she loves to try and sneak a flying cobra video in to kill you 😩😭I say this even after doing the latest "how to get a straight leg capezio" video which was hard but still not as brutal as the flying cobra 🫠

I remember Espi had a "where the f is the pole" video a few weeks ago but then was grabbing the pole this week!

Also I know for a fact you had this move since you had to do it for test out, but I also had a Jasmine to Superman at one point for the same reason 😬😬😬

Espi literally was me getting to the same part when I tried it at Pole Con . I'm gonna need a mega tutorial 😂 My problem is once I straightened the top leg entertaining the idea of taking the foot of the pole my bottom foot started to slide and I was like "nope nope nope"

Stephanie Tallant My problem is creating an inner thigh contact point from most Superman entrances since I have to cross my legs almost at the knees to close my thigh gap and create enough thigh meat and then also the pain 🥺🥺🥺