Finger pushing is the gift that keeps on giving.
Improving the way you use fingers to balance rests on three pillars:
- timing and body awareness - you learn to push and relax your fingers at the right time.
- stamina - you learn to push-relax for longer and longer.
- quality - you make your corrections more subtle.
In the quality toolbox, we have seen:
→ eversion - inversion. Recognising that, despite the seemingly linear, single-planed nature of balance in handstands, both hands also move sideways as you balance. We called our as-flat-as possible position a, a sign that you are deep in your balancing zone, as opposed to a cupping hand position, called position b. Once we timber, the hand clearly moved sideways, almost always supported by elbows and/or shoulders.
→ feathering the brakes. Even with exquisite timing, a good old ping-pong is more of binary way to use your fingers - they’re either pushing, or they’re off. By always pushing at 100% of your capacity (you can probably push even harder than that, but that’s a different story for a different day), you make your subsequent hold more hectic, for it creates more movement that reverberates from the fingers to the tip of your toes through your shoulders. Feathering the brakes is about gradually pushing harder on the fingers, smoothening the deceleration, leading to a progressive braking.
Modulating
Modulating refers to the need to not use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. A few reminders to make sense of it:
- Your handstand is ideally constantly falling forward, and were it not for your fingers, you would bail after a second or so in the air. So your finger pushing make you travel backwards, while your relaxing in the alignment makes you fall again forward.
- Your handstand doesn’t live on a fixed point - it exists within a zone.
- The balancing zone exists between two extremities - the timber point and the breaking point. The closer to the breaking point, the more you’re falling forward. By the time you cross the timber point, you’re falling backwards.
Therefore, the more overshot you are, the harder you should have to push on your fingers. And the closer to the timber point, the more delicate you should be in the way you push - and you didn’t, that would precipitate your fall.
Think of fingers as the brakes on your bike or car, one last time. The further you are within your balancing zone, the harder you have to push on the brakes to stay still.
