The first thing you should when starting with handstands

What a handstand is...

If you have Googled "handstands" before, you probably have found a plethora of advice about what it should and shouldn't be.

Paradoxically, the overwhelming amount of cues and techniques you can now find online makes the beginner's journey slower, if anything.

In our method, handstands are not about doing "the right cues".

There is no one recipe, one box in which we would fit all bodies.

Some people are tall, others are shorter.

Some experience fear, others seem to be devoid of it.

Some will progress fast, others will take more time consolidating the foundations.

Some will be strong or tight, others will be flexible or not so endurant.

After 10 years in the process, I realised that people make much more progress when we work at

figuring their handstand, rather than the handstand.

The goal of my method, in-person and online, is to give each participant the knowledge required to master any handstand shape they want to tackle in the future.

By bringing things down to their basic mechanical reality, my hope is to simplify your journey and streamline it. 

Your homework 📝

Learning is faster when we map out what we already know or assume about a given subject. This allows us to highlight the gaps in our knowledge, the grey areas that need clarifying, and to absorb new information much faster.

Very simply, your homework consists in asking yourself what you know about each of the components of a handstand.

What is a good kick-up? What makes for a bad kick-up?

How would you define a handstand alignment?

Is there different forms?

Where are you at on fear? How do we conquer it? How do we foster it?

From the wall to the middle of the room

Handstands are practiced with the wall.

The wall provides you with the time to think, feel and adjust all the different components you will need to automate specific motor patterns.

Those are a prerequisite to your freestanding (that is, in the middle of the room) handstands. 

Take the analogy of swimming 🏊‍♂️

The wall is the armbands you learn to swim with. It holds you safe as you figure out what to do with your little legs. Eventually, it will just be there for mental aid, but you will have figured out the technique, and will be ready to move on to open waters.

As simple as this may sounds, the following is extremely important: In wall practice, you have one and only goal: to make yourself lighter against the wall.

Mapping out the space around you

To start making sense of what happens when we're upside down, we need a common frame of references.

We will call forward whatever our fingers point towards.

Therefore, backwards is the opposite direction, where the base of your hands, or "heels", point.

Furthermore, we want to draw a vertical line from the centre of our hands up to the ceiling.

Anything past that line will be called overshot, or overbalanced.Anything before that will be called undershot, or underbalanced.