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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on this since the pandemic started, one of 'things I can do from home goals'. It's really hard. I can reliable hold maybe 5sec, and every once and while I can get 10s. It's the balance, I can sort of correct imbalance if leaning too far back-to-ground direction by pushing with my fingers. But if the imbalance is chest-to-ground direction, then I fall because I don't have fingers on the back of my hands. It's been a barrier for me for months. Any handstanders out there with advice please let me know the secret.

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Correcting underbalance (falling towards your chest, away from your hands) is indeed much harder. When starting balancing, most beginners will have the majority of their weight in the heel of the hands, since that feels most natural. However you want to shift your weight forward slightly to feel your weight in the middle of your hand, which gives you a little more margin to catch errors. Ideally you'll balance just with your fingers, but for underbalance I still make some small corrections with either my shoulders or my elbows, I'm still not good enough to catch it with just my hands.

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).

You think it's the balance, but consider that the more strength you have, the less balance you need. For example with more forearm strength you will be able to lean further onto your fingertips. With more shoulder, arm, and abdominal strength, starting from a handstand position you will be able to pivot at your shoulders and bend all the way down to a planche position. So work on your strength, and handstands will become a lot easier.

Here is a video demonstrating the 'handstand to planche' move.

https://youtu.be/SVr1lBxURSE

As far as I can tell, all handstand to planche, and frankly all planche videos are CGI, because this move is impossible. /s

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.

The trick is to use your shoulders and wrists (and elbows to a less extent) for balance, like your hips, ankles, and knees respectively. Fingers help, but they're not the main contributors to balance.

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.

I don't think my shoulder strength is that bad. But I have been trying to work on it doing military press, pike pushups and the like. But, I just keep falling over and I don't know what part to move to counter-act it. It's pretty frustrating actually.

My experience is that overhead shoulder mobility is extremely important to correctly stacking the shoulders and body over the balance point. If you don't have that (I don't), then the handstand feels really heavy and hard to hold.

This video looks like it might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOLOojV9kB8

It's tension created from the shoulder muscles, upper back, and pecs. Think about when you're doing a sit up: your hip muscles, lower back, and core help you sit up and slow going back down. It's these same muscles that keep you balanced when you're sitting and standing because managing balance where your center of mass acts upon gravity requires less work than at the extremities.

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.

A gymnast does a handstand very differently from “normal” people. Due to multiple reasons. Learning how to do a handstand like a gymnast is like learning how to jump like a cat.

Source: breakdancer in my younger years, used to practice together with gymnasts.

Perhaps, but that's how one would hold a handstand for the duration closer to what a gymnast would. Attempting to keep balance with one's fingers is only going to get you so far with a very limited range.

Once I got control in an inverted position, I came to understand what all the gymnasts were talking about. But approaching a hand balance going gymnast drills is generally a waste of time for a normal person. Gymnast handstands look much better though and they have much more control from what I've seen.

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