When working on conquering fear (which is a layered process, all of it doesn’t dissipate at once), remember that you are always working in flux.
You’re addressing a deeply rooted protection mechanism, and by nature the way it presents itself to you each day will (sometimes vastly) vary.
In general, whenever we progress and turn a corner in our handstand journey, our priorities shift.
One easy-to-forget thing is that what used to be your primary goal is now the foundation of what you are trying to achieve.
Do not dismiss these foundations, for they are prerequisites to the next achievement.
And when training is surprisingly tedious - or, as we say scientifically, we’re having a bad day - return to your foundations.
Hone them, master them, automate them.
Going back to our example, as you make our way to the first 5 seconds consistently freestanding, and beyond that point, as you consolidate them into 10, 15 seconds, your foundation will be first and foremost your kick-up and your alignment.
They can seem far-fetched from the priority at hand: removing the fear and catching longer handstands, but
1 - Without a good/better kick-up and sense of alignment, progress will be hard.
2 - On bad day, you’re better off working on what is possible, instead of pushing your nervous system.
3 - They’re not fully mastered yet - and honestly, 10 years in the process, I ask myself: will they ever be ;) ?
This is why the Chest to Wall practice, which forces you to work with no true safety net (while staying within the limits of what you can control), is the cornerstone of your progress between B2W and FS.
You’ll have to be creative here, by:
- Adapting the difficulty of what we do C2W to match our discomfort zone. Neither too easy, nor impossibly hard. This sometimes will involve deliberately doing things we have learnt are “wrong”, like pushing on our support leg to get a split second of air time, in order to expand our trust by confronting our limits.
- Finding hybrid scenarios, ie. a hallway or a spotter, where we work the same technique C2W, but we have a safety net behind us.