How To Instantly Improve Your Handstand

2 Overlooked Tips For Beginners To Stay Balanced

If you prefer to watch a video of me talking about this very same topic, you can do so at this link: https://youtu.be/UHePBi09wfI

The coveted freestanding handstand is a desired pursuit of many different training disciplines. You’ll find it performed by yogis, gymnasts, circus performers, capoeira practitioners, calisthenics athletes and others. Its wide-ranging inclusion speaks to its appeal and to the fact that so many different physical art forms find it beneficial.

Due to the fact that it is practiced by so many different styles of training has also resulted in many different approaches for achieving it. In addition, the quality standards of the various disciplines influence what they consider to be a ‘true handstand’ with gymnasts probably having the strictest guidelines for what counts as one.

For the purposes of this article, we will be focused on entry-level practicality. This means that our goal will be to simply hold ourselves upside down on our hands for at least 10 seconds, without the use of external assistance. Other factors such as alignment will be ignored — not because they aren’t important or worthy of your attention, but because our first goal here is just to be able to do the thing in its rawest form. We’ll revisit alignment another time.

With that said, let’s get into it.

Hands + Fingers

One crucial mistake that beginners make when first trying to handstand is that they place their hands flat on the ground. That works okay for pushups, but isn’t the best approach for handstands.

Here’s why:

As you know, handstands are a balancing act. By placing your hands flat on the floor, you are essentially making it more difficult to balance. This is because your hands are the only point of contact with the ground and as such, when you begin to tip over, that tipping happens where the point of contact occurs. You don’t tip over at the shoulders, hips or ankles. While all those joints are important to maintain balance as well, they are not the tipping point.

When your hands are flat and you begin to tip, you have almost no leverage to counteract the tipping. This is where the fingers (and wrist flexors) come into play. Rather than keeping your hands flat, you’ll want to create an arch between your fingertips and the heel of your hands. Visualize a really low ceiling tunnel. That’s what your hands should look like. The fingertips and roughly 50% of the back part of the palm of your hand are pressed firmly into the ground, while everything in between is hovering slightly above it.

What does this do?

It effectively creates twelve points of contact instead of just the two you had previously. You can now shift your weight between these these points of contact to maintain balance. With a flat hand, you only have two points of contact, which are your entire hands. There is no way to shift your weight around because it’s all just coming down on those two points. As soon as other things in your handstand start to go wrong — which will happen for a long time until you learn to clean it up — you will simply tip over.

With your newfound leverage, when you feel your legs start to fall forward, you can press into the ground with your fingers. This pressing will counteract the tipping of your legs and / or torso. Initially, you may press too hard. If that happens, you can also counteract it by slightly relaxing the fingertips and shifting your weight more onto the back part of your hand.

This back-and-forth from fingertips to the heels of your hands is probably the single most underutilized aspect of learning how to balance on your hands. In fact, it’s so powerful that even if you do everything else wrong, you can still pull off a really sloppy handstand once you get this down.

My practical advice to put this to use is to first practice it by doing a modified pushup with the sole purpose of training this fingertip press. Get into your normal pushup position, but instead of your usual flat hands, put your hands into the low ceiling tunnel shape that was just discussed. Then perform a few sets of really slow reps where you focus on the following:

During the eccentric (going down) portion of your repetition, press your weight into the heels of your hands.

During the concentric (pressing up) portion, press your weight into your fingertips.

Try to do 5 sets of 10 slow reps where you do this back and forth. This will prime your central nervous system and the small muscles (flexors and extensors) in your forearms for the work they’ll be doing when you take this upside down.

Depending on how fatigued your forearms feel after the pushups, you may want to give yourself a rest prior to jumping straight into your handstand practice. Then, whenever you feel ready, go ahead and give your handstands a try!

Keep in mind what you were doing and how it felt when you performed the pushups and activate those same muscles to help you stay balanced. If you need to use a wall at first, then go ahead and do so.

Are you ready for the next tip?

Feet + Toes

That’s right, we’re going to take it all the way to the other end of the body.

Remember that the handstand is a total body exercise and thus requires everything in your body to play its part in order to execute it correctly. The reason we are going to look at the feet and toes next is that they give you the second most bang for your buck after hands and fingers.

While the hands and fingers are your point of contact with the ground, the feet and toes are the point farthest away from that point of contact. From a physics standpoint, this means they have the greatest potential to disrupt your balance.

Any tiny shift that happens up at the feet means that the hands and fingers will have to counteract it down below. In other words, if the feet and toes aren’t doing their job, the hands and fingers will have to work harder to maintain the handstand. The harder they work, the more fatigued you will become and the amount of time you’ll be able to hold your handstand will be reduced.

The way we use the feet and toes to help their friends down below is by generating straight line tension. We generate straight line tension by pointing our toes straight up into the sky. This will in turn cause the calf muscles in our lower legs to flex.

The reason why this matters is because as soon as those calf muscles start to flex and the toes are pointed straight up to the sky, the body will become more of a solid unit. A solid unit is much easier to balance than a bunch of loosely assembled units, each with their own inertia, getting pulled in different directions by the forces of gravity.

If you’re still having a hard time visualizing why, I’ll give you an example that you can try in real life. You may look a little strange doing it and you’ll also need a willing participant, but it will make it perfectly clear for you.

Try to bench press a weight that is fairly light for you. Let’s say 135 pounds for argument’s sake. Then find a human that weighs the same amount. Try to bench press the human, but do it in two separate sets. For the first set, your volunteer should hold their body as tight as possible. Instruct them to squeeze their core and their glutes (buttocks). Tell them to point their toes and raise their arms over their head (“reaching for the sky”) while clenching their first tight.

When they are as tight as possible — but still breathing — try to bench press them. Afterwards take a brief rest and try another set, but this time tell your volunteer to completely relax in your hands. They should pretend they are a corpse. When you’re both ready, try to bench press them again.

Whether you actually go through with this little activity or not, the end result will be that the traditional barbell bench press will be the easiest to control, while the relaxed human will be the most challenging. The stiff human will fall somewhere in between.

To relate this back to the handstand, the same way that the relaxed human feels wobbly and requires more effort to stay balanced on your hands, so too will it be harder for you to balance your own body if everything is relaxed.

Point those toes and get that solid line of tension going so that your hands, fingers and forearms will have to do less work to keep you balanced.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found these two handstand tips helpful and practically useful. I’ve worked with many people who, after months of trying, were finally able to gain balance for the first time after they incorporated the above.

Keep in mind that as I mentioned in the introduction, there is more to the handstand than just what you read here. The reason we focused on these two handstand hacks is because they have the greatest potential to make an immediate impact for most people.

Give them a shot and let me know if you have any questions. I’m always here to help.

Happy inverting friends!

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