6 Month Handstand Progress: What It Really Takes & 3 Biggest Lessons

jesiah

New member
Some weeks ago it was shared here my 6 month handstand progress video and due to the good response I decided to create this post. Here’s the video:


On the journey from a 1s to 25s hold I learned some key insights you can use to progress faster or just improve your understanding about handstands. As a disclaimer, I’m not a certified coach but I’ve some solid background on biomechanics.

What It Really Takes To Learn The Handstand:​

  1. The 5 Minute Skill Work Myth: as an average guy it was not possible for me to just learn the handstand by just playing with handstands for 5 minutes before my strength work. As I’ll explain later I started to really progress when I had a complete 30+ minute handstand sessions covering all the different aspects (bodyline, balance, kick up).
  2. Strong Wrists Come First: my loose wrist tendons made me stop training the handstand several times before. That’s why taking wrist condition more seriously and also using parallettes saved the day for me. Most of you won’t need to use parallettes but still conditioning your wrists is a huge part of long term success.
  3. Strong Shoulders Come Second: most of the shoulder workouts tend to be “bent arm” which is great for building those muscles. However, for handstands that won’t be enough. The shoulders are much more unstable than the hips and yet when doing handstand we pretend our shoulders to function as hips. To be honest your shoulders will automatically start adapting by spending quality time on handstands (here the importance of >30s chest to wall handstands). But you can accelerate the process by adding weighted exercises like “Bilateral Shoulder Circles”.

The 3 Biggest Lessons:​

  1. Handstands Are Like The Stock Market: training handstands can be very frustrating. One day can be really good and the next so bad. Here it’s key to zoom out and don’t let the volatility of handstand training affect you. It’s the same as when you buy some shares of a company. Their price can go up and down in the short term without much reason. But over the long run the price will go up if the company invests in their products and their people. So for handstands if you follow ther right progressions and you don’t train mindlessly you’ll keep improving no matter the daily fluctuations.
  2. Divide And Conquer The Handstand: the best way I found to approach handstand training is to do it with these 3 dimensions:
    1. Bodyline: your body has to be like a stick. As soon as it starts to wobble you’ll most likely fall from the handstand.
    2. Balance: once you’re upside down you need to be constantly reacting to the feedback that your body is giving you to avoid falling.
    3. Kick Up: you need a way to get into a handstand positions as precisely as possible and you’ve to be able to exit safely whenever you need to. (with these 3 things layed down it’s just a matter of objectively looking at your handstand and putting a plan to improve the areas you’re lacking)
  3. The Magic of Handstands: as someone engineer minded I wish I could learn the handstand by just doing sets and reps. But the truth is that handstand is as much an art as a science which brings the psychological component. Still if you want to find some order I recommend you to track “handstand hold time” and “kick up success rate”.
If you can't do the handstand yet, I really encourage you to join this journey as it's one of best things you can find in bodyweight training.
 
@jesiah How many months into your handstand are you? Do you find it hard to post onto Reddit mid hand stand?

I can only go for about a few seconds but I'm looking to bump that number up to a week

Edit to appease the grammar gods
 
The key is to do the handstand near a wall socket so you can plug your phone in so it stays charged over the course of the handstand. You then position the phone under you before starting the handstand so you can dip down and type with your nose.
 
@dawn16 Now I've been almost a year and I can do handstand presses but not very good.
Sorry what's Reddit mid hand stand?
Good luck with your training!
 
@jesiah It was supposed to be a joke on "six month handstand" by misinterpreting it as you doing a handstand for six months but it turned out not to be funny :(
 
@jesiah Congratulations regarding your progress, keep it up!

The 5 Minute Skill Work Myth: as an average guy it was not possible for me to just learn the handstand by just playing with handstands for 5 minutes before my strength work. As I’ll explain later I started to really progress when I had a complete 30+ minute handstand sessions covering all the different aspects (bodyline, balance, kick up).

My personal experience is completely the opposite. I can hold a >60s Handstand on a shitty floor ( ) after 8 months of training for it 2x a week and around 10 minutes per session. I usually aim at around 90s-120s total time hold (usually in 3-4 sets) per session.

A lot of people recommend the GTG method on this sub, which I do not like at all because I find that the fixed costs are too high (warm-up) and that it is impossible to properly recover with this method (wrist extensors especially).

Did you learn the HS on the floor as well? I did not learn it on parallettes for now but this is one of my objective now that I have mastered it in on the floor. It feels completely different in terms of balance as it relies on wrist abduction/adduction rather than wrist extension.
 
@coconut23 I was able to do an unsupported handstand pushup after like 5 months of sporadic training.

However, I still couldn't kick into a handstand. I had to kick up to a wall and 'float' off.

Everyone's different I guess.
 
@coconut23 Thanks! Interesting approach. So for me I could transition 80% of my skill on floor with about 6 weeks by changing set up in only one of the exercises. The main difference I found was that on floor its easier to fix overbalance as the finger pressure is more powerful
 
@jared095 Holding the Handstand, nothing else.

Supersetted with Reverse Plank to work the opposite shoulder ROM and some light wrist flexion stretch during rest time to counterbalance the wrist extension of the HS.
 
@coconut23 I’m always going back and forth on GTG. I recently listened to the Tim Ferris podcast with Pavel and he was you could GTG with grip strength in particular COC grippers. Something about that didn’t sound right at all. Idk it seems like GTG when done correctly would allow for higher volume. The Strongfirst community seems to advocate only two exercises at a time so it gets even more complicated when trying to program it for optimum results. In all fairness I could be over complicating it. I haven’t read the Naked warrior book which I’m guessing is step one for this stuff.
 
@dawn16 I'm the same with GTG.

On the one hand I don't mind hopping onto the door pull up bar and trying a couple as i'm walking around, and I have seen increases in reps because of it.

But in the back of my mind I can't help but think that I'm potentially doing damage to stuff by doing it without any real warm up before hand. Which makes me think its maybe not a good strategy, but I've seen results so I'm never really convinced either way.
 
@angiew Warmups are really overrated for sporadic training. In the 1-5 rep range, you really don't do enough 'tendon damage' that it needs recovery (unless your tendons are already damaged so significantly so as to notice in a 1-5 rep range, in which case OMG-STOP!).
 
@jesiah I've seen a lot of people talk about wrist pain. I had it so bad for 2 years that I couldn't hold a handstand without having pain for weeks after.

I:
  • went to physiotherapy
  • went to a chiropractor
  • did all sorts of wrist excersices for months
  • Wrist straps/ support
None of these things worked for me BUT, the only thing that did work was those excercise powerballs that you see (this) . It took maybe 1 week and the pain was completly gone. I can now do handstands like before (2 minutes +). I now only use parralettes.

This post is quite old now so probably wont be seen.
 
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