Coach's Athletes HS Training Schedule

I am curious about what sort of training schedule coach's athletes follow for handstand training. I am assuming that they train handstand every day, possibly before their strength work. After reading H1 I thought that the training splits proposed there were adapted for mortal athletes and not necessarily the same type of training split that coach's own athletes follow. Thoughts?

Once you've established that 2min handstand, along with adequate wrist/shoulder/bodyline adaption, why wouldn't you do that as a near-daily warmup? I certainly plan to I look at it more as a path to get there as comprehensively as possible, then ramp up the volume. Much the same as basic strength work.

Yeah agreed. I just did my first day of H1 today and am loving it. I was just curious about how athletes at a more advanced level program HS practice. I would assume that daily practice would be necessary for competitive gymnasts.

I know that Coach has his athletes walk across the tumbling floor four times on their hands, without coming down, for warm up. That's 40' forward, backward, to the left and to the right. For warm up. They make it look... too easy

 

Keep in mind that once you have a good body line, handstands for 1-2 minutes aren't that crazy to do.

 

Make sure you spend your time really mastering the weighted bar drills! Get to near shoulder width on all of them!

Yeah I mean 1-2 minutes is not much when you think that the Chinese Olympic team have two sessions a week in which they either spend 20 minutes in a wall handstand (with added weight) or 40 minutes in an unweighted wall handstand. Also, the first time I tried doing handstand wall runs and couldn't even do them for 30 seconds, I thought it was crazy that coach's athletes perform them for 10 minutes nonstop. 

It's going to be a lot of fun when I'm at ramping-up-the-volume stage, but for now, eyes down and do the drills in front of me I'm fired up but patient~

I find that doing around 10 minutes of handstand work around 4-5 times a week works best for me. I usually do it after skill work (so about 1.5-2 hours into practice). In the handstand work itself, I alternate between facing the wall/facing away from the wall, doing them on the floor and on parallettes, doing wall runs facing / away from the wall, doing 1 bar parallel bars hs facing away/towards the wall, doing pseudo "high-bar" handstands (bar parallel to the wall), and a few sets of HS presses into short holds on paralletes near the wall. I've noticed that even after a few weeks of this my shoulders are feeling much better in the HS position.

 

I recently set my personal best at my facing-the-wall handstands, barely breaking 10 minutes (not static - with "shaking it out" and alternating arms after around 4 minutes in), and have noticed that I can control my line a bit more from all that wall work. My freestanding handstand is still not great - I have around a 1 minute HS on a good attempt and 30 seconds on average, but I really like the wall / chinese-handstand work and feel like it will pay off soon enough.

Yeah in my opinion once wrists are prepared and HS alignment is reasonable high volume and high frequency can go a really long way. Especially once I have better alignment I plan to really crank up the volume and frequency of HS training.

What's really going to be awesome is 2-3 years from now, when we have a large group of people who started as adults, with no prior experience, showing off impressive mobility, strength, and skill in gymnastic strength.

I totally agree with you Joshua! I also think that next to mobility and strength we would also have a large group of people with great character since achieving such skills also builds great personality!