The amount of details there is in the way we use our hands upside down never ceases to surprise me.
The fact that most teaching resources seem happy describing it as “push and relax”, therefore, is baffling.
It’s a bit like the feet - we don’t have to consciously think of them working their magic as we work, but studying how each bone articulates at different points of your gait is so complex it can give you vertigo.
You know the gist:
While in the balancing zone (your alignment is appropriate), you can push on your fingers to stop the fall forward and start moving backwards… and you can relax them on time to initiate the fall again.
The repetition of this patterns creates balance.
To transform 1 second into 1 minute, we understand that we need to work on:
#Timing and body awareness
You’re supposed to push when you’re falling. But do you even feel when you start falling? The better we precisely know where we are within our playground, the better decisions we can make when we use the fingers.
Just like the beginner will not know when to relax their fingers initially to create their first “pong”, you can assume that somewhere along the fight the sensations blunt and the timing at which you push or relax becomes suboptimal, usually leading to a fall.
#Volume and finger stamina aka pulse till you collapse
At first, after a few seconds of fight, we’ll reach a point where the mistake is inevitable. We have reached the limit of our finger stamina, of our focus.
Balancing while keeping everything in the right place in the air is mentally taxing. Of course, as the seconds pass, it will be harder to keep doing so.
After all, everyone has a limit in how long they can hold a handstand.
That limit is rarely purely physical (coming back down to the floor because your forearms are on fire) and usually mental (you lost focus and ended up making a mistake).
Once we understand - or should I say as we keep improving our understanding of - the finger pushing patterns and the timing at which to perform them, there is definitely an element of sheer endurance to develop.
#Quality
This is a subtler but just as important topic. Pushing and relaxing are introduced as a binary action at first, and for good reason: we need to figure out the timing.
The learning driver need to know HOW and WHEN to press on the pedal first. Being a passenger won’t be nice, because it will be jerky, but it will be safe.
Only once we trust them to do so can we start suggesting to feather the brakes.
The same applies in handstand.
If the intensity with which you push on your fingers exceeds the needs of your position, it will have ripple effects, swinging your alignment from one extreme of the balancing zone to the other.
More turbulences, harder to hold.
This is extremely common in improvers and tackled through different protocols (finger pushing games 2.0, feathering the blade, hand eversion-inversion)
Introducing: Finger pushing qualities
