Handstand Academy - Start Here

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.

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.

✋

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…

Introduction to fingers