Handstand Academy

There is something we all feel the urge to do the second we manage to kick-up and land against the wall: take off that wall, and experience the thrill of floating for a few seconds.

This certainly must be what a handstands is, we convinced ourselves.

This is in part true, but the picture is about to get a hell of a lot more complex, less random and, fortunately and hopefully, more satisfying.

Floating is not handstanding.

That float is what you will experience when your body is in the right position for a handstand to happen.

A handstand is the result of you fighting for that float and keeping it alive.

The key takeaway here is that you will have to fight for that position to stick.

Regardless of how good a handbalancer you become, you will still have to fight for it.

The difference is that you will be much better at doing so, and that the fight will barely be noticeable.

Floating could be understood as the embers of a handstand.

The better your kick-up technique, the better you get at hitting those rocks together to create the spark that will generate those embers.

However, you don't have a fire yet. You need to feed this with oxygen and adequate wood for the fire to grow: and this is what fighting for a handstand is.

Allow me to take the analogy a notch further: rushing the transition from having reached the wall to taking off the wall is similar to you trying to start a fire on wet wood.

There are a lot of variables to be conscious of at that stage of your handstand, the most important of which being your counterweight positioning.