In our curriculum, we have 6 belts.
White Belt = working on landing on the wall softly.
Yellow Belt = overshooting in the middle of the room.
Green Belt = learning to balance from 5 to 15 seconds in the middle of the room. Consistently!
Blue Belt = the open shoulder, pike Belt
Purple Belt = Shape shifters
Brown Belt = Press, OAHS and complex patterns
This is not a competition.
This is a game.
See each belt as a natural progression from the previous one.
Note: On average, people stay 2 - 6 months in one belt before moving up to the next. Sometimes more sometimes much less - and this is where our tailored coaching comes into play.
I’ll select exactly the drills you need to focus on to maximise progress and breakthrough the plateaus.
Why the Belts
I have been led to believe that handstand can be treated:
- as an organic movement practice, like yoga, with a sense of direction and no need for extreme, engineering-like structure.
- as a You Chose Your Adventure book, with levels, paths, infographics and logic.
I actually was having a conversation with students recently in Dublin where they highlighted that, beyond the physical, it was the mindfulness - dare I say the spiritual nature - of handstands they came for week after week.
2024 definitely has been about expanding my own horizons about this as a teacher.
Of course, all these definitions, as well as you very own, are right.
And they will all call for a slightly different approach.
The Belt system I came up with resonates with the extremely-nerdy-logical profiles amongst you.
It comes from my own frustrations as a learner, diving in the very organic realm of dance 10 years ago, where everything is feel it and be like a seaweed, and then comparatively observing with fascination the borderline OCD behaviors in some martial arts.
As a teacher, I also acknowledged some of the benefits in martial arts dojo structures:
- Comparison was taken down a notch. A white belt doesn’t compare themselves to a black belt asking why them not me, because they know the black belt has poured their life, sweat, tears and blood to get where they are at. They are inspired by them. That’s healthier.
- Eagerness was paced out. We’re all too keen on doing the black belt drills in handstands, but in a martial arts context you do understand that specific drills have to be mastered first before you rush to the delicious appealing ones.
- The experience is gamified. They will all tell you it’s not about the belt - and truly it isn’t, everybody gets their ass kicked regardless - but a material, physical acknowledgment of your efforts in the form of a colored piece of fabric does give you a good hit of dopamine. And in a practice that can feel like a long walk in the desert (I’m talking about handstands), those celebrations can be quite welcome.
Suddenly, the distinction between beginners and improvers wasn’t precise enough.
So I went trough my entire library of drills and classified them in levels.
Each level has a specific goal to achieve, and curated drills to achieve just that.
On top of that, handstands being - at least in the way we do it - a very personalised endeavour, we add the drills and techniques that suit you.
Et voila - best program ever.
This also allows me to look at your foundations from a fresh perspective, similar to the Boulder, and see which potential gap needs to be filled.
For those of you who resonate with that approach, we will borrow from that model in your online program.
On a side note, this also opened the door to, finally, seeing in the horizon how I could teach the method to people who want to teach handstands themselves without living in my head - a teacher training.