Handstand Academy

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Structured learning to conquer a fearless 30 seconds handstands in the middle of the room

Our mission:

Make handstands easy, fun and empowering

The method for busy adults

Handstands don't have to be frustrating.

⏳ We like to be time-efficient, so that you can do more in less time.

🔬 We like clarity, so that you know exactly what to work on, step-by-step.

🎯 So we establish your goals, pinpoint what your body exactly needs and what to prioritise.

We believe in the power of community.

Surrounded by a tribe of like-minded handstand enthusiasts, you receive personal tips and feedback and are hold accountable.

📈 The result: you progress 10x faster.

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Welcome to your new portal.

In here you will find everything handstand-related in clear, structured fashion.

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I’ll be away on Saturday 19th July. Classes resume as normal the following week.

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The missing piece in balancing: Body awareness

Body awareness isn’t fluff. It’s not even optional.

Sure, it’s not the thing you want to train upside down.

It’s not sexy, it won’t make you feel good about your handstand, and, yes, it’s boring.

And still… body awareness is the anchor of your alignment… and the foundation for balance.

Without it, you’ll struggle to breakthrough the 5-second ceiling.

You won’t know why you’re falling, nor how to fix it.

This guide will walk you through how awareness impacts balance (and why you so desperately need to train it!), why can not trust your inner sensations, and how to build an internal map that allows you to hold a handstand on demand and stop relying on luck.

Balance < Alignment

At the core of your ability to balance lies your alignment, ie your position upside down.

My motto is the following:

Good alignment + poor Balancing skills = a consistent 3 - 5 second handstand

Bad alignment + Top notch Balancing skills = inconsistent 1-second handstand with an exceptional 10 second once a blue moon.

To get better at balance, you therefore have to work not only on balance, but also (and sometimes especially) on your alignment.

Alignment, itself, is the understanding of what you need to do with your body, but also the perception of your body in space:

It is one thing to understand what needs to be done…

It’s another altogether to feel it in real time!

In an ideal world…

Handstands would be nothing harder than standing upright.

As you well know after a mere week of trying handstands, this is not true. Yet, a lot of times you train in a way that assumes your body and brain will simply “pick things up”.

This is unfair on you, and will delay progress.

Let’s do the following experiment together:

stand upright, eyes closed.

now move your head slowly forward (towards you toes) and backwards (towards your heels).

Not only should you notice that your toes automatically press and relax depending on your position in space…

But you should have little doubt as to how far off-centred your head is at all times.

You can thank your inner ear for that.

The two wrong assumptions we make when we train handstands are:

Our inner ear and overall feedback system is just as proficient upside down

Wrong.

Upside down, your inner ear will give you a blurry input, not precise enough for you to know if you’re sightly off centred or really, really far out.

Without a precise idea of where you are in space, you can not perform the adequate corrections… leading to miscorrections and holds that are cut short.

Our fingers will automatically do what our toes intuitively do.

I wish!

But I’m afraid balancing on our hands may not be written in our DNA. We need to teach our fingers to do what the toes naturally do

TLDR: You can’t trust your feelings yet…

Your actual shape determines what correction you need, but you’re often wrong as to what shape you exactly are in.

Without knowing where you are in space, you won’t know what correction to apply — or when to apply it.

The Three Elements That Build Awareness

To sharpen your awareness upside down, you need to train body awareness, which rests on three pillars: your body-mind connection, your perception of lightness against the wall, and your hand fine-tuned feedback.

1. Visual Feedback

What you think you’re doing is usually far from what you actually are.

Over time, this gap narrows. But it never disappears entirely.

To bridge the gap, record yourself. at least once every week. Compare between sets what you thought you were doing… and reality.

Yes it can be humbling. Put your judgment aside.

2. Wall Feedback

The heaviness of your foot, hips, or both against the wall ALWAYS tells you:

If you’re actually in a good position, or being held by the wall

You need to learn to interpret this weight, for every position you will want to master.

3. Hand Feedback

Remember, your fingers are your toes upside down. They will register weight shifts before your body does, and give you early warnings about an incoming loss of balance.

In a nutshell, they make up for the blurry input your inner ear is providing you with when upside down.

Start listening to them.

🎓 The Big Balance guide

Let’s pretend you know nothing about balance.

This guide is a summary of how I would go about describing what you’re supposed to do to balance upside down if I met you for the first time.

It will gather concepts and drills we have created over the last decade and clarify the thread that ties them together.

Chapter I: What is balance?

Balance is the cherry on the cake 🍰

First, it begs reminding that balance is not always the priority. If your kick-up and your alignment skills aren’t good yet, working on balance will delay your progress.

Indeed:

You can hold a few seconds consistently with poor balancing skills and an excellent kick-up, but

You won’t hold more than a second with excellent balancing skills and a poor kick-up.

Balance is movement

There is no such thing as “a point of balance”, where everything magically becomes “easy to hold”.

Sorry: balance is a fight, a fight against the desire to fall, a fight to make your body oscillate around an elusive sweet spot.

Balance = spatial awareness + corrections

We now understand that we won’t be sipping any pina colada upside down soon, and that we will be constantly correcting our position.

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To correct your position upside down, you will use your fingers (more on this later).

Knowing how to use your hands will take you a while, and some for perfecting the art of balancing. To do so, you will have to work on the what and the when:

What hand correction should I perform and when?

In other words, it is one thing to know the different actions your hands can perform to hold you upside down… but until you feel where you are in space and what kind of corrections is needed for the scenario you’re facing, you will keep misfiring.

At the root of good balance therefore lies spatial awareness.

To simplify things, spatial awareness is your ability to know where your body is in space. As you may know, this to a huge extent the product of your vestibular system (inner ear) when you are moving upright.

Upside down however, you can bet that this system won’t be enough.

If you rely on “feeling” where your body is in space, you are guaranteed to:

be completely wrong about it at first. Record yourself and see.

not be precise enough about it (”my legs are kind of overhead” is not accurate enough to perform precise corrections!)

Your balancing act upside down will have you move in space. Different positions will call for different reactions, with different intensities.

Think of the balancing tools at your disposal as buttons : as long as you don’t feel exactly where you are in space, you will keep slamming all the buttons together indiscriminately - which isn’t the key to consistent, reliable handstands.

Feeling where we are in space: centred, slightly off-centred or on the verge of falling, and the 50 shades of grey in between these, is absolutely key to know which button to press!

The key: learning to listen 🦻 to your hands 🙌

Your hands are giving your constant feedback as to where you are in space - and what to do (how to correct) to stay in balance.

Distrust your ability to feel that for yourself, and learn to pay attention to what your little hands are screaming.

The Balancing zone

Of course, even if you have honed perfect body awareness and state-of-the-art balancing skills, some positions (most positions actually) will simply be impossible to hold.

There is such a thing as too off-centred (plot twist: it will feel like a tiny inch of a difference at first!)

To reflect that, we will talk of a Balancing zone:

To hold a handstand, you need to stay in the Balancing zone.

To do so, you will perform the adequate corrections at the right time.

To know which correction to use and at which intensity, you need to feel better and better where you are in space.

Remember, in handstand terminology:

Overshot is past vertical.

Undershot is before vertical.

And, surprisingly enough, the balancing zone is overshot.

Being overshot is an absolute priority!

This is why we can describe everything through the overshot lens:

Chapter II: The corrections (part I): finger pushing - relaxing

To correct your position and balance, you want to be using your hands, and more specifically your fingers.

By pressing on your fingers in your favorite hand position, you initiate a backward movement that brings your body towards the undershot zone.

Conversely, by relaxing your fingers and doing nothing, as long as you are within the balancing zone, your body will start moving forward, more overshot.

Pause for a second here. Things are about to get real nerdy. If the information above is not a recap but completely new, take some time to digest it first. When I introduce this to a class, I usually leave 3-6 weeks before we start talking about what follows. The turtle wins the race 🐢

In an ideal world, then, we kick-up into an overshot position (just overshot enough), and we start our balancing process by pushing and relaxing our fingers, allowing us to stay upside down for as long as we wish…

Chapter III: The mistakes

Too good to be true!

Indeed, after a couple of seconds, you will either make:

an alignment mistake, changing the position of your body, which will bring out of the balancing zone, or

a correction mistake, pushing too hard or not hard enough, relaxing too late…

At first, this usually happens pretty quickly - within the first 3 - 5 seconds of balance, or even earlier, as you finish your kick-up and start stabilising!

The mistakes will bring you out of the balancing zone, either in the undershot or the too-overshot zones.

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Importantly, since the mistake takes you out of the balancing zone, your fingers are now… utterly useless!

This calls for a three-prong approach:

get better at locking your alignment - eliminating unwanted parasitic movements to focus solely on balance.

get better at finer corrections - the more subtle your finger corrections over time, the fewer mistakes you make.

improve your mistake recovery - both in terms of detecting them (or even anticipating them!) and the recovery per se.

Chapter IV: Fixing the mistakes - corrections (part II)

If most of us make mistakes that take us out of the balancing zone within the first 5 seconds of balance, how on earth are we supposed to balance for 45 seconds?!

The answer: you become good at cleaning up your mistakes!

Truth is, all hope isn’t lost once you have briefly exited the balancing zone.

There are two small zones living at the edges of the balancing zone where things can still be saved. A tiny window to bring yourself back into the balancing zone and resume the finger pushing - relaxing process.

We’ll call these:

The Timber zone, at the undershot edge of the Balancing Zone.

The Breaking zone, at the overshot edge of the Balancing Zone.

Two essential notes:

→ The tools at your disposal to recover you way to the balancing zone will be different whether you’re falling too overshot (breaking zone) or towards the undershot zone (not overshot enough).

→ Breaking and Timber zones aren’t equal. As a general rule, you have more leeway in the Timber zone - ideally, we assess what you need personally and tailor your program accordingly.

But before we dig into what can be done about these mistakes, remember: we have to feel that we’re even making them!

Chapter V: The warning light in your hands

As stated above, while you understand the concept of “balance in motion” and balancing zone we laid out earlier, you can not only rely on what you feel your body is doing to locate yourself with precision in space. And without that, you can not expect yourself to balance accurately.

A few examples:

If your spatial awareness isn’t great, you may feel that you’re much closer to the Breaking zone than you’re actually are, pushing way too hard for what is needed, which will catapult you into the undershot zone.

Or, you won’t even feel that you are gradually losing your handstands, and by the time you see it… it’ll be too late. A shame, for this fall could have been saved if detected a few seconds earlier!

To correct a mistake properly, you have to feel it first.

Make no mistake: developing a very fine-tuned hand isn’t a matter of weeks, but months and it will take you years until you can fully listen to all the signals it is constantly sending you.

The key is to start mapping out the differences in sensations depending on where you find yourself in the balancing zone.

When it comes to being more overshot, there is usually no problem: you feel your fingers becoming heavy, your wrists maybe pinching a bit, and you know… you’re about to fall out of control.

It’s with the timber zone that things are harder to feel at first.

You need to feel When the weight dramatically shifts in your hands as you are about to lose your handstands, getting dangerously close to the Timber zone.

How you will exactly feel that and how you would describe it is going to vary from one person to the other… so don’t take my words for granted and experiment.

Your sensations will also be affected by your hand positions and the surface you practice on.

There is a very definite moment at which your sensations start changing, usually because the weight in your hands is being poured out of a specific area into another, as if you were emptying a bucket of water into another.

This is the signal preempting or coinciding with the fall in the timber zone.

Meaning: you better stop pushing on your fingers and / or start recovering from this quick!

This is akin to a red light flashing on your car dashboard, and telling you to pull over. Ignore it and keep driving at your own peril!

The no B.S. Press

The press handstand is one of the most sought-after advanced skills.

Many don’t care about flagging or one-arming, but most dream from day 1 of this floating, gravity-defying ability that allows you feet to hover off the floor seemingly effortlessly.

Like most things in handstands, it is poorly understood, poorly taught and poorly adapted to the individual.

This is the most thorough guide you’ll ever find on the subject.

What is a press?

Trust me: Defining what we are trying to achieve is essential to not lose yourself in the web of dogmatic advice out there.

A press isn’t “core” and “compression” and “centre of mass”.

A press is the ability to take off the floor with no momentum and align yourself into a handstand.

The main difference between a regular handstand and a press handstand is that you don’t have the kick-up to generate momentum and reach your desired position.

Allow me to insist a bit further, because it is the lack of understanding around this concept that leads people to pick the wrong drills and never get their press.

If your position on the floor was point A, your starting point on a journey, and the handstand was point B, your destination.

When you kick-up into a handstand, you simply hop onto your car, drive to your destination, push on the brakes to stop the car in the desired parking spot - et voila, you have arrived.

When you press into a handstand, your car was stolen from you. You’re gonna have to commute and hitchhike your way to destination to make-up for the lack of car (momentum).

To get safely there, you need to understand the different bouts of your journey - we’ll call them the stages of your press.

Not only the drills we find out there zoom on some bouts (stages) at the expense of others, but they fail to address the sequence in which they have to be performed and to help you assess which are your strong suits, and which need more work.

This leads to you repeating the same exercises over and over again (say, getting very good at the planching and abduction parts of the journey) without ever improving your restacking… and therefore plateauing.

A few important definitions

Compression

Planching

Simply put, compression in handstands is your ability to bring your legs closer to your chest, usually without allowing the shoulders to change position. To see how compressed your position is, we’ll look at the space between torso and knees.

Planching refers to a forward motion of your shoulders over your hands.

Compression is a product of flexibility and strength.

Importantly:

the more compressed you are in your press starting position, the closer you are to the final, destination position, the shorter and more efficient the journey, the less you will have to planche.

This is why people (usually, flexible people 👀) beat the drum of flexibility - for the more flexible you are here (in the relevant areas) and the easier the press becomes, strength-wise.

The less flexible, the more planche you will need

The more flexible, the less planche you will need

The limiting / facilitating factors of a press

You’re not a factory robot, but a unique individual.

This has always called for a tailored approach in your training in the way we teach handstands… and the press will be no different!

Looking at dozens and dozens of different individuals performing their press, we can percolate the pith of the press - a recipe that works for everyone.

This recipe (the stages of the press) will be somewhat influenced by 4 individual factors, which will greatly influence how you will learn your press, how it will look initially and the stages of the press that will need more work from you:

Segment lengths: because we have no momentum to press up, we start with our hands already on the floor, in a position that:

is a close as possible to the final destination, ie the closer the pelvis is to being aligned over the shoulders, the better, WHILE however

makes it possible for you to take-off without using any momentum

This is absolutely critical. A lot of the advice you’ll find only emphasises the first part, however a more compressed position (we’ll define that in a second), with the pelvis as high as possible in the air, and your feet as close as possible to your feet… isn’t always the one that will make the take-off possible!

I call the initial set-up, starting position: the triangle, drawing three lines from the hands to the pelvis to the feet back to the hands.

The shape of this triangle will obviously be affected if you have short legs and long arms, or long legs and short arms, or something in between.

Not much you can do about it, but it begs remind everyone that we can not look the same as our favorite handbalancer on instagram even if you work a lifetime to achieve the same skill level.

Flexibility:

Your hamstring flexibility dictates how close to your hands you can bring your feet. Which influences:

→ how high the pelvis is up from the get-go, therefore

→ how much planching will be needed,

→ how close or far from the end position you are

your wrist flexibility will also dictates how far forward you can lean.

Strength:

Your upper body strength will be a key component of your press. You will need to be strong enough to fight gravity and take your feet off the floor with no momentum, and to restack your shoulders at the end of the movement.

Simply put, the further from your shoulders your pelvis is, the more you’ll need to planche, using upper body strength to perform the press.

The level of strength required will depend on your flexibility (the less flexible your press, the more strength-based it will be), your segment lengths (dictating the start position, and in particular the initial pelvis position) and your ability level (the more efficient you are the less you’ll find yourself planching).

Ability level:

The more skilled you become at performing the journey with its different bouts from your starting position (the triangle) to the destination (usually a straddle at first), and the more efficient you will be.

This will change how long you stay in each stage, will allow you to skip some stages altogether (more on this later), to rely less on your planche even if you didn’t become anymore flexible.

Do not overthink this for now.

Simply acknowledge your flexibility, anatomy and strength levels and how these will help or hinder progress along the press journey (we’ll assume your ability level is low for now).

Most people come to me at the beginning of their press journey blaming their lack of strength or flexibility… instead of simply acknowledging that such are the cards they’re currently dealt with.

In the majority of cases, there is NO need to insist on flexibility training to get your press. We can work with what you have, grow your strength level to the level required by your starting position, get you your press and refine it into something prettier later.

Stretching till you have a belly on floor pancake is a waste of time if your goal is simply to press, and even if you want a perfect-looking press, it’d be an inefficient way to train.

The Different Stages

Back to our travelling analogy, the press will be comprised of different key stages (the bouts of our journey):

The take-off

The unravelling

The re-stacking

Because they will involve very different motor patterns and training priorities, we will distinguish them by the height between the feet and the floor:

The take-off: low, close to floor

The unravelling: mid-air

The re-stacking: high-up, close to final position

1) The Take-off

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