This drill is the third and final in the series, and will help you begin to integrate the techniques and positional awareness you developed in the first two handstand drills into a freestanding handstand.
As you do this drill, be sure your primary focus is on applying the techniques from the pervious drills. The purpose of this drill is not to see if or for how long you can balance. The purpose is to intentionally integrate. Even just one second in balance is a good start, as long as you applied at least one technique successfully during that one second.
This brings me to the second crucial point: your focus should be singular to start. If you try to apply all of the technical cues at once while also balancing, likely you will fail to apply any of them well. There will be some rare individuals who can miraculously apply all of the cues simultaneously and flawlessly. But your best bet is to choose just one technique and make that your singular focus for that rep. Once you are satisfied with your application of that technique, add one more. And so on.
if you find you cannot apply any of the techniques to your satisfaction while balancing, then try returning to the previous drills and repeat them for more reps over more days. Eventually, after some weeks, your body will remember the position without having to think about it, and it will be easier to integrate it while balancing.
Hand balance is a very technical skill that is a factor of repetition and consistency. As long as you are able to avoid injury, your surest path to improvement is to practice every day. But if this is not possible due to poor recovery, busy schedule, high volume of other training that might result in high risk of injury, etc., then in my experience three days per week is really the minimum to see good technical progress.
Once again, these three drills do not address shoulder flexion mobility. This would be a topic for a separate post. If your shoulders have a limited range of motion in flexion, then your handstand will not look like mine in this video. And that’s fine. You can still apply the other positional cues and gradually work on shoulder flexion mobility simultaneously with your handstand work. You don’t have to wait until you have perfectly open shoulders to begin your journey toward efficiency in a handstand.
Feel free to ask questions and leave your suggestions and thoughts in the comments below.
Happy practicing.
Devin