Dear Practitioners,
Here’s an instructional video covering what I find to be the most useful drill for improving awareness of positioning in the handstand. This is specifically for spine/torso and hip position. If you have mobility limitations in the shoulders, this should be addressed separately, as this drill will likely not help much with that. Perhaps shoulder flexion mobility is a good topic for a future post.
This is the first of three videos in a series. The second will help you understand how to take what you learn from this drill and apply it to an inverted position on the wall. The third will then offer a way to start gradually integrating the patterns learned in the first two videos to a freestanding position, using the wall as support.
By first exploring these techniques on the floor, this allows us to build specific awareness of positioning and effort in a less complex context with fewer variables competing for attention. On the floor there is no need to focus on elevating the scalupae against the force of gravity while holding the whole body’s weight on the hands; we can just focus on the spine and hip position. Then we gradually add complexity by inverting the position; but still the balance element is absent, so we can focus on applying the cues from the floor drill while inverted and resisting gravity. Finally we can gradually, in measured efforts, introduce the balance element—while maintaining the awareness and position developed in the first two drills.
This process of isolating a simplified focus, then gradually and intentionally introducing measured complexity, is a great way to make any development process more accessible and reliable.
Please remember: this drill will help you to get a “straight line” in a handstand. But in my experience it’s not very helpful to aim at this “straight line” for merely aesthetic reasons. If I were you, I would try to contextualize the straight line within a larger framework of making the handstand more efficient, improving positional awareness, and understanding something about the development process itself.
Please feel free to ask questions about this drill or add your thoughts below in the comments.
Devin