Wrist Flexibility for HS Presses

Whenever I see people do handstand presses with a decent forward lean, the wrist flexibility seems amazing. I have nowhere near that wrist/arm angle.

Are planche leans the best way to build up this flexibility, or are there other ways to develop this? Anything you got would be helpful

Turn out a little bit your hands, it'll become much easier to lean.

The best thing to do would be to achieve enough active flexibility and technique to not have to lean forward in the press.

Otherwise, just gradually stretch the wrists and work on leaning them forward more. Soft tissue work of the forearm will help in this scenario as well

yuri said:

The best thing to do would be to achieve enough active flexibility and technique to not have to lean forward in the press.

My straddle compression is terrible, so I figured I could meet half way by increasing my lean while improving the straddle.

yuri said:

Otherwise, just gradually stretch the wrists and work on leaning them forward more. Soft tissue work of the forearm will help in this scenario as well

Do you have any specific advice? I do some half-assed (kneeling) leans 3-4 nights a week before bed, and have been working some of the stomach-to-wall planche leans you suggested in another thread (which has a forward lean component). I'll look into forearm SMR, I didn't even consider that

I think the best way would be to keep increasing your pike flexibility. You can do like you said, but you definitely need a very good pike flexibility for gymnastics.

My wrist flexibility was very poor before, but when i started doing hs presses on floor, it got better quickly. So i guess your wrists adapt to that sort of stuff and get more flexible. Also what yuri said is very true, overall flexibility helps alot since you dont have to lean forward so much to compensate for the poor flexibility. Of course on pbars/parallettes its not a problem since you dont need that much wrist flexibility on those, and i did most of the training on those when i was training for the press.

Plus. you get sort of an embedded work on you swings if you do those negatives on pbars Just swing to HS and slowly lower to L-sit.

yuri said:

The best thing to do would be to achieve enough active flexibility and technique to not have to lean forward in the press.

Otherwise, just gradually stretch the wrists and work on leaning them forward more. Soft tissue work of the forearm will help in this scenario as well

X2

Actually i'm doing a big volume of HS, and my forearms began to feel tigh...

SMR for the forearms (wrists flexor and extensor will be the solution)

http://www.robertsontrainingsystems.com ... manual.pdf

Just go to the Wrists forearms section

The whole manual is gold....

Sorry for the "meh" answer yesterday, I was in a hurry and that was the first thing that came to my mind.

Yuri and the others are competely right about straddle and pike active flexibility and I also heard that good shoulder flexibility would help with this issue.

Since my active flexibility is not that good yet I have to turn out my hands a little bit so that I can lean for the press but I must work on it!

Good luck!

I have found that doing box presses definitely helped my wrists adjust. Volume was a big help too. Obviously not until you are in a great deal of pain, but the more you do the more your wrists get used to it. Find the happy medium, a few months ago i trained toom hard andn hurt my wrist for a week...and still continued training. It was stupid of me to do, but just find the happy medium between smart and stupid like i was.