How to use your fingers in Handstands?
Anyone with a few weeks of handstand practice and Youtube binge-watching will get the vague idea that fingers are central in holding a handstand.
However, the fingers come into play at a very specific moment of your handstand, and will only do their job under specific conditions. In this article, we will talk about the prerequisites for finger control, the role and relative importance of fingers in holding a handstand, as well as the three most common mistakes I see beginners do.
To understand what the fingers have to be doing, you have to really grasp the mechanics underlying the handstand: a handstand is not a resting position upside down that you magically find after thousands of reps and sets.
As we explain in the Handstand Academy, you want instead to think of it as an unstable, “falling” position that you keep in place thanks to two sets of balancing tools:
The micro-correction tools: these are the small, subtle movements you operate while keeping the same body shape to hold your handstand upside down.
Fingers are the quintessential micro-correction tool: used properly, they allow you to hold a given shape without changing that shape.
The macro-correction tools: these are wider, usually more abrupt movements that will change the look of your body. Moving the legs, changing the shoulder angle, bending and extending the elbows are some of the tools in that toolbox. These have much more resonance in your body, meaning that when you perform a macro-correction tool, you will feel and have to adjust for the echoes and consequences of it.
Both micro and macro-correction tools are relevant to your handstand journey, but the priority in which you want to learn them is crucial: because the finger control leads to more subtle, less aggressive ways of rebalancing, they are harder to feel but easier to control. For you to grasp further this concept, stand up with me, and set yourself on your tiptoes.
You can close your eyes and bring your attention to what your toes are naturally doing to keep you in that position. From there, lean your head forward, gently and slowly, and feel the consequential reaction from your toes, fighting harder and harder to hold you in balance.
This is what your fingers will be doing upside down.
This has a few implications:
The fingers aren’t passive.
Just like your toes in that falling position, they are squeezing the floor more or less intensely, somehow relaxing when you are closer to a resting position, and fighting harder as your head leans forward.
If you pushed too hard, you would lose the position
If you forcefully push on your toes, you may feel that your body starts leaning back, until your heels find the floor.
The same happens in the fingers: handstands are not about pushing as hard as you can continuously, on your fingers.
That would make you lose your first stack — check out my video on that topic here.
Instead, they are more of a tango between tension and relaxation, keeping in that desired balanced fall, and you need to know when to start pushing, how intensely you need to push and when to stop pushing.
They won’t fight forever
If you keep leanng your head forward, there is a point at which your little toes won’t be strong enough to hold you in place. At that stage, you will simply fall out of the balanced position by taking a step. This is exactly what your bail will be: a step that you take once your fingers can’t fight for your position anymore
They won’t do their job if you are not in position first
Your toes don’t need to clinch on that floor unless you start leaning forward. They are not useful to you if you. are not already falling. The exact same is true for your fingers.
It’s much easier to hold this if nothing else is moving
While leaning forward on your tiptoes, starting flexing and extending the hips and or the knees, and see what it does to your balance.
Do you understand now how disruptive those macrotools of correction are going to be ?
This is why you want to bring your attention first, and for the first few months of your practice, on learning to use your fingers properly, and only then in assessing the tools of macro-corrections that suit you best and learning to perform them with better control.