What is a Handstand?
Obvious question… but is it?
Teachers and students alike tend to rush on drills and techniques without ever stopping to look at the big picture.
This results in you practicing in the dark without stopping to ensure that what you’re doing makes sense.
Throwing things at the wall hoping it will stick, if you will.
So let’s start with a counterintuitive definition.
One that may go against what you have heard before.
A handstands is not a comfortable, vertical position that you try to kick-up into and stay in.
A handstand is a fall forward.
It doesn’t exist at vertical.
It exists past vertical
This has huge implications for our journey together into kicking-up.
We don’t try to kick-up into a perfect position.
We try to kick-up in a zone where we can fight for balance.
A zone that usually feels past where our handstand should be.
Useful definitions
Before we start talking more about the actual kick-up, we need to establish a common terminology.
C2W & B2W
Handstands are usually practiced with a wall, sometimes with a spotter, and at some stage without any help or support.
We refer to the practice where our back is facing the wall as Back to Wall exercises, or B2W.
We refer to the drills where our chest is facing the wall as Chest-to-Wall, or C2W exercises.
We refer to the practice with somebody correcting us a a spotted practice.
And, last but not least, we say we are freestanding when we launch ourselves without any safety net.
A note for later:
This is not a pyramid of progressions. While spotted is harder that B2W, and freestanding is harder than spotted, you don’t really graduate from the wall. You learn to use it differently until you don’t need it, but it will always have a place in your arsenal as a tool to correct and improve your skills.
ALIGNMENT
How your body is shaped upside down. The position of your shoulders relative to your hands. The placement of your pelvis. The tilt in your pelvis. The position of your legs. All that defines what your line, or alignment, is.
OVERBALANCE & UNDERBALANCE
We just talked about the necessity of not thinking of our handstands as being something vertical, but rather something that exists past a vertical axis.
This splits the space around you into two zones:
what is after vertical, ie the overbalance, or overshot zone.
what is before vertical, ie the underbalance or undershot zone.
This is extremely useful language. If I need you to move your right leg behind your back, I will say: your right leg needs to be more overshot.
If your kick-up falls short of the vertical axis, we will say that you undershot.
If your kick-up goes to far out of control past the vertical axis, we will say it’s overshot.
Wait a second.
This is where things usually get confusing.
Is overshooting a good or a bad thing?Both.If you overshoot just enough, in the zone that you can control, then you will be able to hold a handstand.But if you go too far out that zone, there will be no handstand.Therefore,Our work in our kick-up practice will be first about overshooting at all costs.And if you’re still dubious about this, take a closer look at the videos of people holding their handstands. Look at my students.And, then, it will be about controlling our kick-up so that we land within what we can control in the overshot zone
The Desired overshot zone
As we kick up in a handstand, naturally, the more we can manage the momentum, the easier it is for us to achieve balance eventually.
Let me reiterate, because I want you to get rid of your bad habits TODAY.
Your priority, as per step one, is to be overshot.
→ If you are too overshot, however, it will most likely be impossible for you to recover.
What you are aiming for, therefore, is to kickup just enough to position your body past vertical.
Handstands = falling past vertical in a controlled way
That is why the first step of your training is to kick-up against the wall and manage to get to the wall 10 times out of 10.
If you can't reach the wall just yet, don't worry - I have a few tutorials about this for you.
Once step one has been achieved, we want to land against the wall softer and softer.
For this, we can work on three main things:
- the power generated by the
front pushing leg
- the power generated by the
back swinging leg
- the control exerted by (aka shoulder opening)
shoulder flexion
Your mission, at this step of the recipe: landing softer and softer, but landing at all costs, on that wall
