Handstand 'ah ha' moments

Hi everyone, there is a wealth of great information here, so don't view this question as a request to reiterate what has already been said.

However, I am wondering if anyone can share any 'ah ha' moments they have had when training for a free standing HS. I feel like I have been 'almost there' for the past six months, and am getting a bit frustrated. I can hold a wall HS for 2 minutes and do 8 head-stand PUs, so I hardly think strength is an issue.

So, for those who remember the first time they realized that they where actually holding a handstand, was there anything you thought you would try that ended up making the difference? That 'ah ha' moment when you realized you pulled it off?

thanks,

David

My ah ha moment was when I learned how to keep my body tight while upside down. That's the biggest problem I struggle with when trying to teach people handstands. They are always either loose in their lower back or their abs. You have to try to make yourself as rigid as possible. Something you can try to help with the balancing, is to find a place where you can put your feet inbetween two bars while in a handstand. Have them just far enough apart that you can freely balance in the middle but if you start to fall your feet hit one of the bars and you can adjust yourself back to the middle. This works best with therabands instead of bars. Does this explanation make sense?

Dillon

can you walk on your hands? I practiced walking a lot before I learned to balance and from there it came pretty easy

by walking you can increase the time on your hands unsupported without technically maintaining balance

Walking has helped me a ton on learning where my balance points are and how to make those small adjustments when needed. Another thing that I struggled a ton with was the ability to concentrate on my lower body tightness while finding my balance.

Again now that I have my balance points and know how to correct myself from the walking i find myself having more time to really focus on the lower body much more. Every time i find the balance point i have time to squeeze that lower body and then I can feel the "ah ha" I have it!

I figure working on both helps a ton. more ad more I am able to put the two together faster and faster until hopefully I can get my whole body tight at the same time as I find that balance. Yuri's right though walking helped me a ton as well. I have started walking over small objects as well (ex. two folds of a panel mat).

I love Dillon's idea with the bands or bars...I can see where that would help huge. Good tip!

Dillon Zrike said:

My ah ha moment was when I learned how to keep my body tight while upside down. That's the biggest problem I struggle with when trying to teach people handstands. They are always either loose in their lower back or their abs. You have to try to make yourself as rigid as possible. Something you can try to help with the balancing, is to find a place where you can put your feet inbetween two bars while in a handstand. Have them just far enough apart that you can freely balance in the middle but if you start to fall your feet hit one of the bars and you can adjust yourself back to the middle. This works best with therabands instead of bars. Does this explanation make sense?

Dillon

that's a good idea.

likewise, if you can find a clothesline to help spot your feet you it is good as well. it is light enough that it can help balance but not enough so that you rely on it to stay up

I actually made a list for myself, like a checklist, on this very same subject. I was wondering "what are the main pointers to remember to keep a steady handstand?" and "What are the 'mantras' to remember to add seconds to your freestand?" They are these, in order from most significant to least significant (for myself):

- COVER YOUR EARS: This is ultimately the best overall addition I've learned to make in my handstand. I read it from the "interview with Handbalancer" -thread. Just shrug your shoulders high, and cover your ears. To me this also meant having a far more narrow of a stance, and that helped lots. When the hands are close together they're stronger, I guess.

- Open your shoulders: This especially helps with stopping the kick-up and keeping the balance on the fingertips, rather than closing the shoulders and having an arch (albeit a tight one) in your back with the balance on the palms, which makes holding the handstand more difficult (or easier, depending on your level of technique-nazism)

- Touch the sky with your toes: This helps tense the right muscles without overtensing.

Not that it helps at ALL, but I tend to force myself to hold my head so that my ears are in line with my arms (as in not looking up). This I've gotten from watching Ido's handstand videos, and I feel it's much, MUCH more difficult to hold, but it's far more rewarding to be 100% straight instead of the "York" style handstand that looks like a total mess.

Hope this helps as my debut.

EDIT: Real quick note, just an empirical thing I've noticed when training handstands: It's rarely about strength... But it's still about strength. I feel I balance exponentially better if I hold a couple of minutes of wall one-armers before trying to do handstands. That, or those cast wall walks, I believe they were called. Those are some wild awesome drills to wake up the muscles to hold the balance right.

Flexing everything before even kicking up into position. By shrugging the shoulder into the ground, flexing the traps, abdominals and glutes before kicking up it became significantly easier to catch balance and maintain it. Seems like common sense but took me a while to figure this out.

For me, more importantly than anything, is learning to balance from your fingers. Body position is one thing, and a very important one, but you can have the worlds best position and not be able to balance (believe me I have seen this a lot) unless you know how to catch the balance, which is most effectively done from the fingers. A handstand is always an active balance, you stay because of (ideally very small) adjustments you make in the body. These can be done in the shoulders, hips, arms, etc. but the fingers are the ones that most easily can make the most difference.

To be able to balance off the fingers requres you to have your weight ever so slightly leaning forwards. If you have 1% lean forwards and you neutralize it by the force from your fingers you stay, regardless of body position. This is NOT to say that you shouldnt train positioning because you most definitely should. However, learning to balance from your fingers gives you the ability to balance a free standing handstand more easily, and thus a lot more time on your hands, which in turn will help you correct your position.

These are really useful tips.

I tried to cover my ears with my arms, it really improved the performance in balancing. But I can't touch my ears with my arms, even if I get my hands as near together as possible. Is there a video how narrow this has to be? Or how wide is the optimal distance between the hands?

Shoulder width is generally recommended.

I've had 2 aha moments so far. One was locking my bottom shoulder in position whilst doing either flags or HS wall runs(I was pleasantly surprised both times, but I'm not sure which was first), I have no idea what fits where but humerus/scapula position allows you to lock the shoulder in place like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

The second was when I learned to suck my stomach in, which I'm pretty sure gets rid of the arch in my last few vertebrae.

Dillons comment about abs and lower back tension is totally on the mark as far as my Hs's are concerned. That will be my next aha moment hopefully.

These are all excellent pieces of advice, and I have found myself obsessively re-reading the replies before going back to the wall for another set. A great example of what an excellent community this is.

Key findings that this thread has helped me focus on:

- Body tightening. Yes, I knew everything has to be tight, but as Dylan pointed out with teaching, I did not realize that when I went upside down I let things get floppy.

- Balancing from the fingers. Once more, I knew it was important, but once I really started to emphasis it, I was surprised how much of a difference it made. Handbalancer's 1% drill was really interesting to try, and hammered this in.

- Khassera, I am now making a mental list before each kick up. Cool trick, and it works.

I will also find a place to handstand walk, but it might have to be when it gets warmer and I can go to a grassy area. It's funny, I assumed that would come after learning to balance, and was surprised to find it as a recommended progression.

thanks!

David

If you can't find parallel bars to balance in between, you can do it in a narrow hallway in your house. I do a modified cast wall walk to get up into position, then place my hands in the middle of the hallway and remove 1 foot at a time from the wall. This has been the best training aid I found for myself, because like you, strength is not an issue for me. If I lose my balance, I just kick off the wall and try again.

Also, filming yourself doing a handstand is a good way to learn as well as quash bad habits (or undesireable habits) before they get too ingrained. I was pretty excited when I held my first 10s+ handstand because I thought I was straight, but when I filmed it, i discovered I was pretty curved. I would have continued training like that if I hadn't randomly decided to see what I looked like, and it would have been difficult to change into the straight bodied handstand that I want to get eventually.

Finally, if you're like me, you may find that a lack of shoulder flexibility is hampering your progress. It's exponentially easier to maintain your balance if you're in a straight line. Consider adding some shoulder mobility routines to your daily training if you feel it might be an issue - Ido Portal and slizzardman have some good routines that you can find on youtube (ido is portalido on youtube).

I just recently read Odelia Goldsmith's blog, and she's doing 2-3 sets of handstand workouts a day.

Same with HandBalancer, you guys train many times a day. How would I go about programming for the "sets?" They can't be overly intense, can they? I'm currently doing just random timed holds all throughout the day. Would it be more beneficial to do 2-3 more focused "workouts" to build the handstand balance?

If someone could, I would greatly appreciate it, post an example "set" how to work the handstand.

My minisets look something like this:

- Parallette routine (Vsit -> HSPU -> HS hold -> MSH -> ATP -> Vsit)

- HS hold on the ground "freestanding" with a toe-touch to catch myself if I loose balance for about a minute (total work)

And that's it. Any suggestions?

I'd like to add something here.

I don't know if it's aesthetic, or if it's "correct" or "right" to do this, but a great addition to my handbalancing "a ha" moments would be to flay the fingers so that the second knuckle is in the air. Meaning "grabbing" the ground. This really helps me stop the kickup and balance out the handstand even with poor form or body alignment. Just kicked up and held my first 30 second handstand. It wasn't straight for the first 10 secs, which I spent in aligning my feet very, very slowly together, but after that I held it for 20s without a problem.

this is what my sessions usually look like these days:

shoulder and wrist warmup, straddle and pike stretches

a line drill or two

couple HS holds switching between various leg positions

3 pike presses as I am still working on getting them stronger

one arm distribution

a bunch of sets of OAH in whatever positions I am working on that day

end with a set of flag and/or HSPU

finish with one endurance set, typically about one minute

and because of the gym I've been training in, I may do some planche work, weighted pullups or front lever afterwards, maybe finish by rolling my shoulders out, some stick dislocates and a contrast shower

This thread topic is relatively old but the information is extremely helpful. Shouldn't this become a sticky?

Now that this thread has been bumped I have some things to add

I made a lot of progress when I learned to relax in a handstand. Of course this goes against what is taught in gymnastics, but I stand by my point. I see so many people who are unable to balance because they focus so hard on squeezing everything they lose focus on balance ans waste energy.

By all means, engage what you must. The body needs to be kept in one piece but only minimal tension is required to do so. One thing to remember is that the same rules of standing on your feel apply to handstands, it's more about being aware of your body than it is tensing everything. Of course, for beginners it's better to be more engage than less, but it's one of those concepts that is easier to tell kids to do but is not always the reality.

The other thing is pushing. I've been messing around recently with pushing out more due to heavier volume on straight body OAH. For me there is a difference between pushing and elevating. Thinking about the push helps to put my shoulder in a better position, however in a one arm there is still a point when i can elevate higher, so I don't push all the way out. It's more the mental cue that helps for me.

On two arms I just think about open shoulders, ribs in, and hips extended. Sometimes I get lazy with completely opening my shoulders but try to remind myself.

One other thing I do is separate my strength work fr0om my balance work. Gotta go to work though, more on this later

yuri said:

... The body needs to be kept in one piece but only minimal tension is required to do so ...

Almost correct.

Minimal tension is required once you are advanced enough to selectively squeeze only what is needed. Beginners have no such subtlety of control and will need to squeeze everything initially.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

I started training for a HS just because I thought it would be fun to try it. Never really got around trying to learn it when I was, say, 12 years old, so time to get going. I was not burdened with any knowledge then but after about six months got to the point where I could balance and hold for 30+ seconds. Mind you, we are talking about holding a beautiful banana shape; quite esthetic if you can agree that a curved shape can also be pleasing to the eye. I can tell you that was more than a “ah, ha†moment. I was ecstatic. Looking back though, the “ah, ha†moments in reaching that 30+ seconds hold of a banana shaped HS were 1) resisting the urge to come down (willing yourself to stay up), 2) keeping pressure on my fingers to overbalance, and 3) focusing on my feet to keep my body movements small.

That was more than two years ago. I then discovered this GST board, where I read all about the straight HS and started the quest for a truly straight HS with open shoulders that were pulled up to my ears. Off and on, it has been a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I hit on a very long dry spell where it concerns “ah, ha†moments and for about two years I stalled making sure that with a bit of practice I could do my 30+ second banana shape HS again while trying to straighten things out.

Only recently I finally figured that “opening your shoulders†and "pulling shoulders into your ears†can be trained separately (of course, if I could have gone to a seminar I would have known that much earlier, but we live to learn, don’t we). That, for me was a huge “ah, ha†moment. Because now I think I can progress again, training my HS while actively pulling my shoulders into my ears (i.e. I am using my shoulders instead of my upper chest to hold myself upside down) even if my shoulder flexibility is still lacking. My HS has gone from a banana shape to more of a pike shape due to lack of shoulder flexibility. I finally discovered how to actively push my shoulders into my ears (even with lacking shoulder flexibility) by practicing in a room where I can just put my hands flat on the ceiling when I stand up straight (feet flat on the ground and arms straight up). In a HS position (in that room) I have to push hard so I can balance by catching myself with my heel brushing the ceiling while keeping my legs tight (yes, I flex my feet instead of pointing my toes). I basically practice this position, holding until I can’t balance with my heel because my shoulders give up or because I am losing body tension and start sagging into the banana shape. The next “ah, ha†moments have become predictable, I think. Opening my shoulders and effortlessly finding my balance after kicking up.

Coach Sommer said:

yuri said:

... The body needs to be kept in one piece but only minimal tension is required to do so ...

Almost correct.

Minimal tension is required once you are advanced enough to selectively squeeze only what is needed. Beginners have no such subtlety of control and will need to squeeze everything initially.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

No worries, I still teach beginners proper body tension. But I don't necessarily teach standard gymnastics handstand either.

However, I never had any a-ha moments from learning how to squeeze, I got them from learning how to relax and just be aware of my body. I now think of the balance as a feed back loop of feet to hands, back to feet. and so on.

I think one other important concept is to not treat HS as a strength move. I use the guideline of always being able to hold a conversation during HS, so that's how easy it should be. All of the HS training should be geared to making the handstand as easy as possible for you.

For strength it is the opposite, trying to make everythigng as hard as possible. I think the two mentalities should be separated, that is to say not to ever include HS in strength work or strength in HS work but to keep the two different philosophies in check and to know the difference between them.

Yes. Separating the neural aspects of holding a good handstand from the tissue-training aspects of building a body that is strong enough to hold the position is a very good idea.

Coach Sommer said:

"Beginners have no such subtlety of control and will need to squeeze everything initially."

Coach Sommer here seems to me to be discussing the idea of appropriate and skillful effort.

The process of handstands for the adult beginner is a process of shedding or sloughing off unnecessary effort, like unbraiding a rope, strand by strand, so that the only effort remaining is that necessary to hold the shape.

Rather than building it piece by piece, it's like each person's ideal handstand is already encased in marble, and all that is superfluous must be chipped away to reveal it.

In the beginning many people have the tendency to hold their breath and squeeze every body part so intensely that the limbs vibrate and shake with effort.

It also seems to me that most adult non-gymnast beginners all go through the same progressive sequence of learning.

That is, they tend to all make the same mistakes, in the same order.

Yuri made a good point about 'feeling' the loop between hands and feet, hands and back, etc.

The person has to feel and internalize each sensation beyond or deeper than intellectually.

They have to develop a faster-than-conscious-thought feel or gestalt for what needs to be engaged, and what does not.

What's also always interesting to me is the often wide array of innate talent and ability that varies from person to person, regardless of background.

I am fortunate enough to incorporate handstands into classes to about roughly 40-50 adults per week, mostly in their 30's-40's, and all with no gymnastic experience.

Some people walk in, and despite being office-bound for 20 years, can immediately go upside-down with decent or open shoulder angle, and have the disposition for balancing on their hands.

Others begin one piece at a time, with kicking up, and then learning to find their legs, their bellies, their feet, etc.

best,

jason

I feel like Jason's point about unbraiding the rope or chiseling the sculpture has captured my experience in becoming more comfortable upside down, although comfortable is a relative term. Personally, I have found this process involves removing too much clay and staring at an unwanted result for a long period of time, reapplying the rough clay/strong tension with slightly less than the original starting amount and chiseling away once more.

This might sound a bit silly, but my biggest "ah ha" handstand moment was realizing that as soon as my hands touch down to the ground, my first priority before anything should be getting my legs up into the correct position. Every time I go into a handstand, the only thing running through my mind at first is "get your legs up, get your legs up, get your legs up!!!"

Too often in the beginning of my handstand journey, I would just rely on momentum to carry my legs into position. If it wasn't enough, I fell back and if it was too much I fell forwards. So my big secret is use your STRENGTH to carry your legs into position and make this the first priority. When I figured this out, it took me from seldom 1 second handstands to occasional 2-3 seconds to frequent 3-4 seconds within just two days.

After that, my next aha moment was realizing that my second priority is to push, push, push the floor. At least as beginners, pushing hard is vital in my experience.

Finally, the other big aha was realizing that I was putting too much weight on my right hand, causing me to always fall to my right side or requiring me to take a step forward with the right hand. I now actively focus on distributing the weight to my left hand. This "aha" basically eliminated my problems with overbalancing and now I hardly, if ever, fall forwards or to the side.

I also did, and still do, study my movement patterns with my legs. Since leg balancing and walking is second nature for almost all of us, it can be an interesting tool used to study how the body naturally balances itself and corrects imbalances.

Currently, I am dealing with trying to find the best method for me to save underbalancing. I feel the aha coming soon. Lowering CoG hasn't been helping me...

yuri said:

Coach Sommer wrote:

yuri wrote:

... The body needs to be kept in one piece but only minimal tension is required to do so ...

Almost correct.

Minimal tension is required once you are advanced enough to selectively squeeze only what is needed. Beginners have no such subtlety of control and will need to squeeze everything initially.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

No worries, I still teach beginners proper body tension. But I don't necessarily teach standard gymnastics handstand either.

However, I never had any a-ha moments from learning how to squeeze, I got them from learning how to relax and just be aware of my body. I now think of the balance as a feed back loop of feet to hands, back to feet. and so on.

Yuri and coach. I didn’t grasp this “relaxed tension†concept for balancing until I started practicing to balance standing on a plank on top of a basket ball (I use an old bookshelf of 90 cm by 40 cm and a regular size basket ball) as an active rest (I do not have enough room for my slack line in my cramped attic gym). In the beginning I could only balance squeezing hard with my lower body and legs. But after not too long I discovered that I could hold my balance and control rolling the ball going back and forth and sideways with minimal tension. So nowadays I do this exercise until I reach that stage of “relaxed†tension and then start my hand balancing practice. It helps me a lot. For those that have never practiced walking a slack line, be careful. Start holding onto your ring straps (for example) and then let go. In the beginning I had a couple of spills because I panicked. It takes a while to discover thow you can just calmly roll off when you loose your balance.