@jesiah How do you know when you should start working on freestanding?
I never have trained handstands but am trying to start implementing it and have a decent base strength. Should I work on floating off of the wall for a while to get balancing down?
@khuleman Yep, no matter your strength level the wall is still your friend for learning balance faster. As rule of thumb I would say 5-10 second holds and then move freestanding
@jesiah I think most people won't agree but I recommend to not start freestand with kick ups. Imo and from my experience it's much easier to work on your press to hs strength. A lot of people are afraid of doing free hs cause of falling. It's much much easier to fall down when you kick up because there's much more momentum. I can do hs for about a year or even more. First I could get into it by pressing, not kicking up. Even now my kicking up is not the best.
So mobility training, press strength and hamstring flexibility.
@latestnews That's a contrarian approach and I agree that most people including myself when I started try to learn the handstand by just doing kick ups which is suboptimal at best
@latestnews Also agree. Most people are shooting themselves in the foot over the long term when they just focus on the kick up. They're bound to hit a plateau one way or another. Shoulder and leg mobility help make the handstand much more consistent, and the presses help develop better balance and allow progress to more advanced stuff.
@latestnews I want to work on my compression so that I can start on presses. To me its want i want to achieve. I think presses look much cleaner and refined.
Until now i've not been too interested in handstand work but its becoming more and more appealing to me.
When I was learning hs I've just suddenly discovered that I can almost do a press into hs. I just tried it, but I've already had a bit of strength. I was doing a lot of L-sits, a lot of hanging leg raises, toes to bar in my abs routine and so on. This gave me a hip flexors' strength. I didn't do any pike compressions. But I was new in calisthenics then.
If I could start to learn this now, I would do a lot mobility things (shoulders, hamstrings), pike compressions, pike walks.
You can try to press with feet on an elevation + straddle. Next you can do the same, but not straddle and first you go to tucked hs and then straighten the legs.
@jesiah My goal for this year is to get a strong 45 - 60 second free handstand and I can relate a lot to many of your points particularly about building up the wrists. I’ve noticed also that some days I just seem to have great balance and can hold it effortlessly and other days i’m flailing all over the place. It can get frustrating at times but I’m
making gradual improvement. How many days do you train handstands now and what do you do in a typical session?
@steven999 That's a great goal man. So I train 4 days a week and now my training is more focused on handstand presses but I still get 2-3 basic exercises like chest to wall hold, toe pulls and tuck. You can find more details on the video I shared and in my youtube channel.
@jesiah Congrats! I was practicing handstands too for 2 weeks and progress was good untill i i jured my back because i did the banana position too often and i didn't focus on keeping my body straight.
The injury wasn't that bad, healed in 1 week. But now i need to fix my wrist pain before i can practice handstands again.
In the beginning, how did you focus on keeping your body like a stick? It is so hard because i have troubles balancing and then i also need to focus on keeping it straight.
@draguaine Thanks! So I would train keeping your body like a stick with exercises like straight bodyline drill and front bodyline drill. For balance I would do in that order from easy to hard 1 frog stand, 2 headstand and 3 finger pulls / toe pulls at the wall. You can find these exercises in the routine from my video "how to do a handstand in 90 seconds".
@jesiah Nice! Good job! I practiced a bit this summer and I want to pick up practice again. How did you train your wrists? I want to train it on the floor so maybe it is different for you. I know some stretches but I want to do more since I think my wrists are a weak point.
What did you do to keep your bodyline? I often look like a banana at this moment.
@robel23 Thank you! I did the wrist routine from Tom Merrick which includes conditioning for both floor and parallettes:
(btw I only did his novel wrist movements when I had pain).
For the banana shape try doing chest to wall handstands as close as you can. Also you can check my handstand tutorial to learn the exact bodyline cues:
@jesiah Thanks! I will look into this. How was the psychological part in the beginning? I have experience with training stuff that is difficult to master in juggling and with diabolo and those thing require a lot of concentration. I think those are a bit less physical tiring but training longer than 20-30 minutes was simply impossible because I ran out of concentration. How was this for you when training handstands?
