Gaining flexibility

Hello, I have a question regarding flexibility. I would eventually like to attain pike press handstands and handstand press from straddle L to handstand, but through searching the forum I've been getting a lot of different information about the types of stretching and to do. Now since these are active skills you clearly need active flexibility, but since I can't do any splits, pancake, or backbends (I know it's not applicable to the skills at hand, but still a goal). So to the crux of my question, would it be more beneficial to attain a reasonable level of passive flexibility before focusing on active flexibility? This may seem like an obvious question but the loads of information on the Internet seemed to skew the answer. Thanks for your time

-Will

Good question. Both will help. I use both together which give better results than just one. You will however, get a bigger result from whichever is least developed.

Both go hand in hand. I had a fair amount of passive flexibility built up before gymnastics, near splits, compressed pike for years and it definitely limited my ability in gymnastics upon starting.

Both as mentioned, programing wise, active first or as part of warm up, passive second or as part of cool down.

BB- what do you mean by passive flexibility limited you at first in gymnastics?

I had never worked on active flexibility before gymnastics while developing a lot of passive flexibility. So when I got into gymnastics there was and has always been a huge imbalance of my passive to active flexibility.

Blairbob said:

I had never worked on active flexibility before gymnastics while developing a lot of passive flexibility. So when I got into gymnastics there was and has always been a huge imbalance of my passive to active flexibility.

Ok i see. Did you find that the active caught up quickly or was it like starting over?

Thankfully it seems like there has been decent carryover for me from the more static yoga style to more active.

Subjectively i feel much better doing more active work now. But i'm in a unusual situation where i've been purposefully losing flexibility to gain stability and power.