Balance can be distinguished in two phases:
1. The stabilization phase
2. The balancing phase
Roughly speaking, at the end of your kick up (which sometimes will be sub-optimal and often will have a lot of momentum to make up for), you have to stabilize yourself, before you enter a position where your fingers can do the bulk of the work and rebalance you for as long as your physical and mental capacities allow for.
So:
Kick-up → stabilise into a viable alignment → start balancing
This is a crucial distinction because 99% of the drills that we can do at the wall and that we see publicly out there focus on the latter but do not make you better at the former.
Think about it: when you are back to the wall or chest to the wall and you take off, you have the luxury of time to
- place yourself in an ideal position to take off when you're ready and not a second earlier
- to preempt your body tension, your spatial awareness, and your finger control,
- to be perfectly ready to receive the loss of balance and try to counteract it.
While this is not easy, it is TOO comfortable to mimic what really happens in real handstand life: you will often get into a suboptimal positions with too much momentum.
So by the moment you can hold yourself with comfort for 5 seconds off the wall, we have to start spicing up the way we take off the wall to add the chaos we will face when we are kicking up free standing.
If you ever find yourself plateauing on your success rates when it comes to kicking up and floating close to the wall without trying to touch it or kicking up free standing, ask yourself:
"Is it really my balancing skills that are at play here? Or am I not stabilizing properly?"
Because if that's the case, more balancing drills with zero momentum at the wall may not quite well be the solution for it.
If we kick-up perfectly, we enter a very good alignment and can start already the fine-tuned work at the finger level.
As long as you maintain smooth balance this way, we'll say that you're "balancing".
But if we don't, or if we "lose it", we enter a realm of chaotic macro-corrections that can last for a few seconds.
These have been referred to as "turbulences".
As you fight through the turbulences, trying to maintain balance, we'll instead say that you are "stabilising".
This led to the following observation:
Wall drills in which we control all the variables before taking off allow us to work on balancing… but not so much on stabilising.
They mimic what a kick-up devoid of turbulence and misalignments would lead to.
Not easy, and certainly your priority on your way to 5 - 10 seconds consistently freestanding.
But around that time, or by the time taking off the wall C2W and B2W for 10 seconds becomes relatively easy, let's make sure we don't over-indulge in balance at the expense of our stabilisation skills.