How to Approach the Handstand

Capoeira can be challenging for many reasons, and one of those reasons is the several foundational movements that are needed to progress to more complex ones are simply difficult to learn, especially as adults.

One of those foundational movements is the handstand. For people who haven't already spent a lot of time on their hands as kids, this is a really challenging movement to learn for several reasons. It very physically demanding of your shoulders, wrists, and core, and requires not just strength but mobility in all of those areas. On top of that, it is a very specific skill and requires learning new types of coordination while you are upside down. But that doesn't mean it is unachievable if you weren't a gymnast when you were younger! All it means is that a specific, graded approach is needed that considers those needs and common issues so you can quickly and safely progress. Here we will talk about just a few of aspects of how we approach this training!

Shoulder & Wrist Preparation

One of the key elements of injury prevention in our handstand work is shoulder and wrist preparation. These are two areas that see a lot of overuse injuries, especially for people who are not used to being on their hands. Preparation work for both of these body parts is critical to longevity in your practice which in turn helps you make more consistent progress. On sample wrist exercise is the First-Knuckle Pushup. Here we start in a pushup position with knees on the ground and hands flat. Keeping all fingers still on the ground, lift your palms as high as possible, then lower down with control. We can make this harder by lifting the knees off of the ground, or easier by doing these pushups on a wall. For shoulders, Shoulder Dislocates are an important staple. Here we grab a resistance band, and keeping arms straight, lift it over head then continue behind you until it touches your lower back, and return. This can be made easier by grabbing the band wider, and harder by grabbing it more narrow. These are just two of a wide range of techniques that can be used to better prepare your body for the work of handstanding.

Overcoming Fear

The ideal balance point in the handstand also happens to be the point where you most feel like you will fall backward over yourself! The fear of falling on your back commonly prevents people from fully inverting. To help get over this fear, we teach multiple methods on how to "bail out" of your handstand attempt so that you are confident if something goes wrong, you can exit safely. Coupling that with a wide array of safety equipment like crash matting allows people of all ability ranges to safely build themselves up to their handstands.

Starting Progressions

We've talked previously about the importance of progressions, and the exact same approach works for learning handstand. The progressions we use involve first removing the balance portion so that we can work solely on strength, then slowly getting more inverted to progress that strength and incorporating the skill of the movement. An example of this would be starting with plank holds, advancing to elevating legs on a block, then using a wall to get fully inverted. Once you are comfortable with wall handstands (facing the wall), you can start to pull off of it little by little until you can balance fully. The actual progressions we use will change based on people's particular needs, and they are not always strictly linear, but this is just a simple example on how we think about progressing up to our final goal.

This is only a short sampling of how we start to address handstand training in new students, send me a message if you want to learn more!

-Instructor Mike