Practicing your timber recoveries is arguably one of the most important skills you can work on to quadruple your consistency rate - which the most important thing in the whole handstand world (till we get to the blue belt).
Let’s see how I would suggest you include them in your training program:
A two-prong training template
1)Am I overshooting today (DO YOU HAVE A LEMON TO SQUEEZE)?
When working on holding longer and longer handstands, you will face days that are a bit off… kick-ups won’t be consistent, stability will suffer.
You need to catch yourself early when this happens (usually, you detect it within the first 10 minutes of practice as you start freestanding), and re-orient your training session towards diagnosing what’s happening and honing your foundations (commitment, alignment, kick-up).
I know you’re tired of it by now, but remember our pyramid of priorities: balance comes last.
So, always train, remind yourself of (yes, you should get bored of it!), cement and solidify your ability to get in the desired overshot alignment that works for you.
🎯 Finding a 2-3 second handstand where you don’t try to fight for balance, that is overshot and slow and controlled, 50% of the time, is a good mark.
Once you’ve done that, and if successful in finding your freestanding alignment, you can move on to improve balance.
2)How can I hold longer (CAN YOU SQUEEZE MORE JUICE)?
Your work now - the exciting part - is to teach yourself more balancing skills and precision as to squeeze more and more juice out of your handstand lemon.
In an ideal world, you kick-up into the perfect handstand with control and ideal alignment.
Your fingers pushed, just enough, at the right time - and keep their gentle ping-ponging on autopilot.
You hold with ease, effortlessly, daydreaming about what you will cook tonight.
Unfortunately, handstands don’t live in an ideal world.
Yes, you have to get better at:
- pingponging longer
- pingponging on autopilot
- getting into your ideal position with as little disruption as possible
ie: performing better when the conditions are ideal.
But, we also have to factor in all the instances where you miss the mark and make mistakes. For if we have to rely on perfect handstands to hold 30 seconds, our consistency rate will never reach any significant height.
ie: performing well enough where things go sideways.
To ensure you work on both, start with your finger-driven, micro-correction drills. These can be stamina-oriented or quality-oriented. Refer to lesson 6 and the drills of your module for this.
Continue with your macro-corrections (either leg, pelvis, shoulder or elbows - in our case today, elbows).
Finally, if you have achieved a certain level of mastery in your macro-correction (you’re able to stick some of them) blend both:
micro-correct → force a mistake and macro-correct → restabilise and start micro-correcting as soon as possible.
Micro-correction: leave the fingers at the door
Since you’re isolating micro vs macro-corrections in this approach, you need to be strict with how you drive balance only with fingers on this part of your training.
Zooming on the macro: elbow gradation
The purpose of this lesson is macro-corrections, and specifically elbow-driven macro-correction.
Before we even start blending micro and macro, we need to achieve a certain level of mastery in the latter.
This takes time.
Be patient.
Here are the different stages:
Going from phase 1 to phase 5 can easily take a few years.
But this final ability to stick your timber recoveries is at the core of a close to 100% consistency rate - and oh do I wish that for all my students!
Importantly, you will now stubbornly stick to one phase until you fully master it before moving to the next one.
You don’t need to do so, and I know you: you wouldn’t anyway even if I asked you.
🌶️ Note that you can spice up each stage as you get better:
Detection: try to challenge how early you can detect the beginning of a timber, as to have only the minimum correction to apply
Cauterisation: try to hold the cauterised position for longer (3-5 is plenty. 10 seconds i a great, advanced goal. try to catch in a deeper position (elbows more bent or shoulders more planched)
Timing: try to catch a later and later, more and more fallen mistake
Directional: -
Stabilisation: try to spend longer in the journey from cauterised back to the default, stablised handstand (5 missipi seconds are a great goal)
This means that you can work on different stages with different degrees of spice:
eg. barely bent elbows (grade 1) for the stabilisation phase, but elbows pretty bent (grade 3) for the cauterisation phase
