How to Do a Handstand
nerdfitness.com
nerdfitness.com
1) It was incredibly full of fluff. The actual content was actually not unuseful, it made me want to start practicing handstands, but the whole thing could have been quite brief without all the memes and marketing.
2) The gifs of the exercises (not the memes) were far superior for a reader compared with embedding, or worse linking, youtube videos. They did both here but I was already in skimming mode from all the fluff. I've read a lot of articles on gym stuff lately and it's pretty annoying having to repeatedly scan through 20 min videos for a 5 second demonstration.
Yes. It’s probably a valid assumption. We are not necessarily their target market.
I wonder who your "we" refers to? I mean the site is called "Nerd Fitness", seems to me like we, the average HN reader, are exactly their target market :-)
Don't be so aggressive just because they've got a different understanding of humor then you do.
> A handstand is one of the coolest exercises ever, but it’s also one of the most advanced moves to learn.
I doubt any gymnast would agree with either point.
1) First of all, it starts with a short, numerated table of contents at the very top that includes everything that the article covers (with clickable links so you can skip the fluff)
2) It includes textual descriptions, videos and GIFs that make it very easy to understand the exercises.
3) The article also explains not just WHAT you should do, but also WHY you should do it
4) It's written in an entertaining way (it's a matter of taste, but I kinda like it)
5) While they do try to sell their stuff, it's pretty transparent and they are not hiding anything behind a paywall.
I highly recommend incorporating at least a static hand stand against the wall into your morning routine, then try work up to turning it into full blown handstand pushups just a little bit at a time.
Used to just do pushups daily, then my friend's girlfriend who did acrobatics and crap talked me into doing handstands with her one day. Never looked back, material QoL improvement ever since, thanks Stefi!
It feels a lot better(and arguably looks cooler)
I’d imagine flexion also ain’t great to press with, but excessive extension seems to be way more common (and in common push up technique, the norm)
[0]: https://woodpower.com/products/woodpower-parallettes-push-up...
I already do lots of pushups daily and have for decades, the handstand pushups are just something I enjoy in the morning. It's more how I finish my morning stretches than exercise.
The lots of pushups probably already has my wrists well prepared for the activity.
I think the US as a developed nation suffered as many COVID deaths as it did due to the nation's average fitness and high percentage of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. I have metal plates in my left wrist due to a fall injury, and I had no issues with handstands and the rings. I would say my wrist flexibility and mobility improved.
I have a powerful aversion to introducing any generally unavailable facility to my daily fitness maintenance routine. Practically everyone I know who has gone down that path has a tendency to turn it into an excuse for not maintaining their fitness. Out camping? Oh shit, I don't have access to $dependency, guess I'll be a lazy slob today. Late for work? Oh shit, can't make it to the gym today. Pandemic? Oh shit, can't make it to the gym and exercise anymore because it's closed.
Nope, nope, nope. Every time you advise someone to introduce an additional dependency into their fitness maintenance, you're arguably lowering the probability they will consistently perform it. Quit it. My personal dependency threshold stops at a wall and some floor/ground space. Even this has become a bit annoying when I'm sailing, but I have found I can still manage stabilized handstand pushups below-deck with my feet braced against the low ceiling.
But the exercises do look useful.
My wife replaced most of her diet with beef (which she used to think was unhealthy), started fasting, and lost 50 pounds in a few months (people would say it was impossible/unsafe if I gave the exact amount) and now looks like a supermodel. The real food helped her headaches and depression, and she stopped taking a bunch of medicine. Both of us are aging in reverse.
If you think I'm oversimplifying, maybe it's just not that complicated. My wife's experience is proof of that. It really frustrates me how we've taken something so simple and natural like food and made a huge mess of it.
The article has some good information, but I was disappointed in the execution. As disappointed as when George from Stranger Things caught his best friend Mark kissing his crush Ellie after they’ve killed a monster while listening to A-Ha (I assume that’s what usually happens on the show).
I tried figuring it out with no guidance as a carefree 18 year old and managed to have a very unclean handstand.
I tried relearning it properly as a 30year old and found out that a decade or computer work left me without the proper shoulder mobility to protract overhead with decent internal rotation.
As a result I can get severe neckpain (usually 4-6 weeks to recover) coming from overactive upper traps
I've slowly gotten to the point where I'm fairly well-rounded as far as being able to use core, pecs, glutes, lats etc. during various exercises, without overly taxing upper traps.
If I were to do things over again I'd probably start with a regular yoga practice just to get better mind-body connection and get full body strength to a decent baseline.
For handstands specifically you might check out this guy's video which imo is well thought out, thorough, designed for people not already in shape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XJ2zR5tE0I
From the same guy, I've been following a full body mobility routine which you may find useful too—seems to hit a lot of spots that get problematic through desk work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2SOrScNbww
Ive always tried to limit the amount of weight I do with these and do it at most every other day, vs say everyday !
Is definitely (weirdly so) one the exercises that always made me "feel good and strong". Its generally considered a "slow lift" and it can become quite meditative !
Aside from the well earned reputation programmers have for believing they can solve any problem, this is good old bro science. Popular on the Internet. And worth ignoring, or at least being very skeptical about. Bad advice can be pretty dangerous.
- practice methods of bailing out from the start
- after wall-walk, rather than taking both legs off the wall with your body facing the wall, kick up so you're facing away from the wall and try to achieve balance
I have seen a lot of gym going adults attempt to learn handstands. Vast majority will give up. Teaching even the gym population to hand balance is not easy.
This is really something I think of as “fitness fluff”. It’s not really science, it’s a simple training plan that’ll probably work for >50% of the reasonably fit population. It’s also a training plan to accomplish a specific thing, do a handstand. It doesn’t really feel like a discussion on whether handstands are good and what regressions to apply where; why judge it so.
The bs and “real” science on nutrition and exercise both face a replicability crisis. The salt you take with all this bs (or studies, advice) will also help you achieve bigger pumps during hypertrophy training.
p.s. Don’t take the “bro” in bs too literally. It comes from all genders and identities equally. Anecdotally the biggest purveyor of bs in my life was a woman who went to med school. I still hear and say plenty of bs in my circle of crunchy climbers. You apply it moderately and trust your gut on what’s reasonable in the face of _massive_ complexity.
Nothing in the comment seems to say that:
> In this comment section: techies giving confident fitness advice. Exercise is good for you when done right. There is risk of injury when done wrong. Much like any other skill, exercises can be learned, and how fast you learn things varies. If you can, get someone knowledgeable to guide you, it makes the learning process both easier and less frustrating.
I think it rather says that techies, whether physically active or not, are prone to give confident advice that doesn't necessarily become less confident when it leaves their field of expertise. That is, I took it to be caveat lector—some techies are physically active and knowledgable (which is important!) and some aren't both of those things; you can't tell from reading a confident comment whether it is the voice of earned expertise or the voice of presumed expertise; and, if you're one of the techies who isn't yet physically fit, then getting in over your head (literally, I suppose, for handstands) or developing bad form can be quick paths to injury.
Here's how I taught myself:
1) Facing a wall place your hands on the ground a shoulder width apart about a foot away from it. 2) now on your hands and feet, kick one leg up towards the wall, then land it back on the ground. 3) repeat 2, try to get your leg higher and higher, allowing your second leg to also leave the ground.
Keep doing this until you go vertical. If you go past vertical your legs will simply touch the wall and you can push off it back onto the ground.
Once you get comfortable doing this you'll find you're able to Handstand without touching the wall and can hold it. At this point ensure your head also goes vertical.
Practice handstands every day and you should be able to do them in just a few weeks.
Your comment feels like a shallow dismissal because it seems oversimplified to me. I am ~90% confident if I followed your suggestion I would be injured. While the article provides advice on how to proceed through each stage fairly safely. In fact, in the tips and tricks section of the article there appears to be a video of someone following your suggestion and injuring themselves.
The article also suggests a belly-to-wall handstands at some point, which (according to my teachers) is a much better exercise for a proper handstand then a back-to-wall handstands.
Two things that help me practice these days:
- voice-controlled timer to keep track of handstand time: https://timeless.aslushnikov.com/ (I didn’t find any readily available so hacked my own)
- facebook’s “Handstands Anonymous” group to boost motivation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/handstandsanonymous/?ref=sha...
I had no idea what that word meant before taking it, but I've been doing it for a couple of weeks and can confidently "float" up to a handstand! Can't hold it for very long though, so I'm working on that.
For example, some pushup regression (e.g. pushup with your knees on the floor) followed by regular pushups builds arm and shoulder strength/stability. This would make learning the handstand much easier and safer later on.
For those curious about the potential injuries, I was doing a handstand on a raised platform, fell, and had my right elbow get pressed to my left shoulder behind my head. This resulted in a tear of my teres minor and my subscapularis, as well as some nerve damage in my abdomen. Ended up needing surgery to restore functionality in the shoulder. I've got about 85% return of functionality.
I don't regret my time doing them, and would likely still be doing them if I could (I no longer have the flexibility in the right shoulder to bone stack effectively).
Granted that wall could be complete covered by kitchen and/or cupboards.
Why? In the US it is very common that all your walls are studs for structure with sheetrock for surface.
https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/dead-hang...
Most of your practice and progress is _not_ the hand-stand. It's all of the lead-up. It's like that story about "stone soup":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
The handstand is the stone soup. You'll actually do a bunch of exercising with no magic handstand at all, and once you're good enough at all of that stuff, you'll get the hand-stand as a bonus. Just like the stone soup is only ready once a regular soup is made without the stone.
Source: gymnast for over a decade in my younger years
Edit: to add, most people don't have the shoulder strength to hold a handstand, so doing workouts to strengthen your shoulders and upper back is going to contribute a lot more than just doing handstands alone.
This video looks like it might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOLOojV9kB8
The same principle applies to a handstand, but it is instead your shoulders, pecs, and upper back. I was being a bit broad when I said shoulders, sorry.
Source: breakdancer in my younger years, used to practice together with gymnasts.
Interesting thing about this one is that he doesn't put is palms down but balances on the fingers and thumbs. I put the weight on my palms, most youtube handstand explainers say that's ok.
Some other things that help beginners - starting with your hands on the ground when kicking up is easier than coming from standing, since you can remove a lot of variables. And also kicking up to a split handstand (i.e. keeping your kicking leg down) and finding balance there before gathering the legs helps a lot too. Your centre of mass will be lower and you'll have more levers to use to find balance. A straight handstand is actually the hardest of the basic variations to balance. This is a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNyGK6z7iKo.
Keep at it! I think these articles claiming to get you to a handstand in 30 days are kind of disingenuous - it takes nearly everyone much longer than that to hold a static handstand for, say ~20 secs (i.e. requiring finding balance, holding it and then rebalancing).
Other good exercise is curling on floor in “hollow body”position.
Or if you are like me and trained chest all the time and can’t keep blocked elbows due to that then raising arms while in prayer position is helpful.
And probably for most of people here “dead bug” exercise is needed to learn how to activate core (due to sitting all days)
Edit: I will use this post to promote acroyoga. Check it out guys as lots of techies seem to enjoy it.
I have a solid handstand and I covered my exact process in 40 seconds: https://www.instagram.com/p/CeGzIrEDyTb/
A few people on Instagram and TikTok have commented saying this video was all they needed to close the final gap in their balance.
If you are reasonably fit, 1. is a matter of a few tries. Source: in primary school it got one PE lesson to get all of the class to do it. I also showed this to a few people as an adult and they just did it after like 3 attempts.
Getting from 2. to 1. is just practice. Don't do it on a hard floor.
Maybe I view it as too easy because I learned it as a child.
This is my experience with headstands. Never lost the ability to do them (gained as a child). I was surprised when they were treated as a big deal in yoga classes.
It can be done.
Kids also learn physical moves much faster. I only know a couple of adults that have learned how to handstand as adults and even then, they were already fit or had good strength to weight ratios. Still took a long time to get a good looking hold.
I’ve seen kids just pick it up and start walking and hopping with control in weeks.
I can still do a handstand, with difficulty, but I can do it. To be fair, it was always with difficulty, it takes a few tries.
I was 14/15 when I could do it.
> Still took a long time to get a good looking hold.
You need to get it right for 1 second to call it a handstand IMO
Just kick up with the right amount of force and you’ll float for a few seconds. That can be achieved with luck.
It’s ok to not be good at everything.
I don’t know your background, but this reads like the mentality that gives a lot of “bro” workout communities a reputation for being irresponsible and injury prone.
Call it a handstand when you can do a handstand, and work your way up to it humbly. Your joints will thank you.
I don't think many people would call that a handstand. Or at least, if you do then the definition is so wide as to be useless. There's no balance at all involved for 1 sec, just luck.
I've never been able to maintain balance of a handstand as a kid, I haven't actively played sports since middle school, and I haven't done any amount of meaningful exercise in over 3 years now. Yet, I feel very confident I could do a handstand within 30 days of practice.
Please be careful.
I'm also uncertain how 50kg is the weight of a normal person. If I get below 75kg I'm around 5% body fat, and I'm barely above the US male average height. Getting to 50kg would mean losing a substantial amount of muscle mass, I literally have never had enough fat and so little muscle (even when I was obese) to be able to healthily cut down to that weight. And, again, I'm only about 1cm over the US average.
In this paragraph you seem to be interpreting "A normal person at 50kg" from the parent comment to mean "the average person, who weighs 50kg", when what they are saying is "a 50kg person who is neither too fit not too out of shape". A slim (but not extremely thin) 5'4" (1.62m) woman weighs around that much.
This is my guess.
If writing an article that says 0-30 then you have to assume worse that that - someone who has never run a mile.
Is there really anything fitness wise that a person who literally has never run a mile can do in 30 days?
You might as well criticize this by saying that an 80 yo couldn't do this in in 30 days.
depending on what you are doing now, you could also focus on continuous breathing so that you don’t hold your breath, which can be a normal reaction to doing something with power, but limits endurance
Mixing interval training and steady state cardio works wonders
So was I :-)
If you're talking about a freestanding handstand, held for 15-20 seconds, then I would bet a beer that your confidence is misplaced. It's surprisingly hard, it requires a lot more strength than you'd think and the balance take a lot to learn.
You don't have to take it from me, you can take it from Jeff Bezos's friend's handstand coach: https://www.inc.com/tommy-mello/in-a-recent-shareholder-lett...
It also depends what "form" you're going for, as capoeristas sometimes have a different method than yogis. Some want you to learn only by shooting your legs straight up, some are fine with rolling into it, some start with a wall, some start from a shoulder stand. I personally prefer the "flail my legs around trying to look at the closet mirror and then fall on the pile of dirty clothes" method.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YHIV4a81Os
Personally I use the one above and a few other and rotate through them between sessions
the load on the shoulder joints in this position is very unfavourable.
millions of people run every day, of course there are injuries.
It’s the finger, wrist and elbow joints and ligaments (your fingers need to act as toes, your arms are now legs) and not learning how to bail safely (if you flip over and don’t have the reflex to cart wheel out).
There's a reason why handstand pushups (often done against a wall for muscle-building/strength purposes) are considered an advanced shoulder exercise. It's sort of the calisthenics equivalent of the overhead press.
Do free floating handstands for time and see what hurts more.
But if you do it safely, risk of injury is very low. Less than spraining an ankle running on wet grass (which football and soccer players do all the time).
I could also walk on my hands for a fairly long distance (it turns out once you are comfortable with supporting your weight on your hands it is easier than standing still), and when I had a spotter or was against a wall could do 1 arm hand stands and press up from a tripod headstand to a handstand (which is in fact super dangerous if you don't know what you are doing). It is one hell of an upper body work out though ;-)
Unfortunately I have not down any inversions in probably a year now due to the pandemic and other issues, and several months ago I injured my shoulder in unrelated way, so probably not going to be getting back into my old routines any time soon...