How I Taught Myself Handstands - Fear of Falling, Sore Wrists and Learn To Handstand As A Beginner

Hey guys, how are you going? I hope you're all doing well and welcome back to another video. In today's video we're going to be talking about one of my favourite topics which is no not calisthenics but definitely a subset of calisthenics, handstands. Now if you know me you'll know that I spend a lot more time on my hands than I do on my feet and I'm probably a little bit more coordinated nowadays on my hands than on my feet but I don't have a conventional learning how to handstand journey so I'm going to try and find some footage but this is me when I started handstanding and this is me more recently and it's taken a long time to get to this point, a lot of tears, a lot of tantrums, a lot of hard work, a lot of practice but also a lot of fun. Now just in case you've never met me before and to give this video a little bit of context as well, my name is Lucy and several years ago I lost a significant amount of weight and then fell into the wonderful world of calisthenics and body weight training and that is where my handstand journey began but I am completely self-taught, I have never done gymnastics before, I'm super uncoordinated, I literally could trip over thin air, in fact I regularly do and I didn't learn handstands in a conventional way either and that is the whole preface of this video so essentially what I want to do is have a brief chat about my history with handstands and how I've learned but then take you through some of the tips and tricks that have been really beneficial that I've worked out along the way which maybe aren't the traditional advice that you would see. There's also some questions that come up a lot when I post my handstands on Instagram or on YouTube and I just want to quickly run over those as well so we're going to be talking about fear of falling and how to get over that and whether your wrists should really hurt. Now I did previously make a couple of videos on handstands, I've done a handstand workout video and I've also made a video about how to progress into handstands and I suppose the correct way of doing it, I will link them in cards and down below as well if you want to have a look at those. In this video though we're just going to like I say go through some of the extra additional information and probably more beneficial information in some regards for beginners. So before we get into the main part of the video I'm just going to really quickly run over my experience and how I got into handstanding and what I did. So I don't have a lot of footage from when I started because really I was just doing it for fun and I never thought this would become my job. If I'd known in hindsight I would have definitely filmed a little bit more but I'm sure I'll be able to dig up a few videos of when I started and I will put them up on the screen. So for me I had absolutely no clue what to do when I started so what I chose to do was just fling myself up into a handstand to see if I could even do it and I had absolutely no training at this point, I wasn't super strong either, I'd been doing HIIT training and a little bit of running and that was pretty much it. So I just tried to get a bit of hang time and literally every single time I would just fall straight back over but I started to find it was really fun, I really enjoyed the process and I just kept practicing and I was doing this sometimes up to an hour a day, I would just be trying to handstand and it was fantastic because you can just put some music on, you can literally do it anywhere and you can just get into your own world and that's what I really love about calisthenics but also handstands in particular. Eventually after some time of doing this I started to notice that I could maybe hold it if I was lucky for one second, enough time to basically take a screenshot of it and assume that I'd done a handstand and it was at this point that I started to look up some cues and some things on the internet as to how I should be doing a handstand properly and that was things like pointing your toes and gripping the floor and so I started to consciously try to bring that into my training as well but pretty much I was still just flinging myself up into handstands and over time, and we're talking months and years, I started to notice that I got better and better. So I kept practicing that and then I started to work on some different shapes and just moving around in the handstand and then eventually it became a lot more subconscious. I noticed that I started to get a little bit more hang time and I was able to hold a handstand most of the time for around five seconds and it was at this point that because I was getting a bit more hang time I started to notice that I was becoming a little bit more subconscious in my movements so things like gripping the floor and pointing my toes and aligning my body was just becoming a little bit more natural and easier for me as well. And from there I've just kept practicing, I've worked on some different shapes and some different forms but realistically the journey never seems to end and that's what I love about calisthenics, it's just never-ending and you can collaborate with people on all different levels and they're always going to be working on something themselves. So at the moment I'm still trying to develop my skills, I'm trying to work on things like one-armed handstands and also press handstands which I feel like is impossible but then I also felt like a handstand was impossible at some point but I'm working on all these things and there's never really an end point for me which is what I think is so amazing. So that is my handstand training in a nutshell, it's very very simple in what I did but it's just taken lots and lots of practice and lots of time as well and I've enjoyed every single minute of it. Let's get into the main part of the video, let's just start with looking at the form in a handstand and just running over some of the cues that I have found really beneficial or come up with in my head that might help you when you're trying to understand what you should be doing when you're in a handstand and then we'll talk about wrists and fear of falling as well. All right let's go! Okay so there are a lot of things that you need to focus on when you're in a handstand and it's one of those things that when you're a beginner you'll find that it's really hard to focus on everything that you need to and as soon as you focus on one thing you'll forget about another but the good news is the more you practice it will become more subconscious and you'll get better at being able to fall in those positions naturally but today we're going to have a look at some of the main ones that I think are important to focus on. The first one being your hands, so your hands need to be your new feet so they need to really grip the floor and we'll talk about this later. Secondly your shoulders really need to push the ground away as much as possible so you want to bring your shoulders up to your ears, you want a slight posterior pelvic tilt and again we'll go into a bit more detail in a second, you want to squeeze everything in your body but especially your quads and your glutes they really need to squeeze hard and finally you want to really point your toes. Okay so let's talk about hips, now when we're in a handstand what we really want to aim for is having a nice long line where our wrists, our shoulders, our hips and our ankles are all lined up straight on top of each other. What we want to help achieve this is to have a slight posterior pelvic tilt or you might also hear this referred to as a hollow body position. So what is posterior pelvic tilt? Well essentially what we're talking about is the rotation of the pelvis, so day to day you just want to have a nice neutral alignment with your pelvis and that's shown here so not too far back and not too far forward. What we find is when the pelvis starts to rotate anteriorly we end up getting this lumbar arc, this can be due to some muscle imbalances or weaknesses however it's also not a position that we want to really be in as it puts some undue pressure on the spine and especially for handstands is not going to be a good position to be in. On the other hand we have posterior pelvic tilt so this is when your pelvis is going to scoop down and up so think tucking your tailbone under and squeezing your butt. Now naturally if you squeeze your bum you're going to find that you start to come into this position and then you start to wrap your ribs in and pull your belly button in and you'll find that it's much easier to stay in this posterior pelvic tilt position. Again this is useful for handstands because it creates a long line in the back however normally we just want to be in that neutral position in day to day life. For most of us it can take a lot of work to practice this posterior pelvic tilt position and staying in that hollow body so one of the best exercises that I would recommend is starting to work on hollow body holds so make sure you put these in your routine if you're starting to learn how to handstand. Okay so let's talk shoulders. Shoulders are a huge component of a handstand and it takes a long time to get it right and I want to keep this video as simple as possible because obviously I was self-taught and I'm a beginner so I want to keep it in layman's terms. Essentially when you're in a handstand you just want to push the floor away as much as possible. You want to think about bringing your shoulders to your ears. This is going to give you a really strong base, help with that long line and help with stability as well and it's probably better shown in this clip here. So this is the poor version where I'm not really pushing and I'm sort of just laying into my arms and here I'm actively pushing the ground away and bringing my shoulders towards my ears. Again when you're learning handstands this is just one of so many different things that you need to start to focus on and remember so take it easy and you can always do a chest to wall handstand and practice really pushing the ground away so you can build up your endurance and your strength. Now obviously shoulder mobility is going to be really important in a handstand as well because we want to get that nice alignment and something that doesn't come naturally to most of us so make sure you put some stretches in and some mobility work. This is a fantastic nice exercise to do and also some shoulder dislocates are really useful as well. Okay let's quickly talk about toes. I don't have a huge amount to say here, the main message takeaway is point your toes as much as humanly possible. Not only is pointing your toes going to help with finding some balance but it's also going to create a lot of tension in the body especially in your lower limbs which is going to benefit you when you're in a handstand. At first you'll definitely need to consciously think about doing this however the more you practice you won't be able to do a handstand without doing it. Okay let's move on to hands which I think are a really crucial part of the handstand that's often forgotten about. Now obviously when you're in a handstand your hands are now becoming your feet and it can be quite frustrating learning to handstand because it feels like it's taking forever and it doesn't ever seem to make any progress but you've got to think it took you a long time to learn how to walk and it's going to take you a long time to learn how to handstand as well. Now a really good way that I've learned to think about how your hands work in a handstand is to think about your feet so if you stand up right now and lean forward you'll find that your toes will dig into the ground and in doing so will push your body back slightly so that you don't fall over on your face. Similarly if you start to lean backwards onto your heels and start to shift your body weight backwards what's going to happen is your heels will dig in and your toes are going to try and grip onto the floor to help balance and pull you back to that centre position. So let's now flip that and look at it on our hands instead. As your body will move forwards your fingertips the pads of your fingers are going to push into the ground and try to push you back so that your body isn't going to topple over. Similarly if you start to come backwards the heel of your hand is going to push into the ground and your fingertips are trying to grip the floor to help pull you back into that centre alignment. So essentially every little movement that you are making with your hands is going to help keep your body aligned and upright in exactly the same way that your feet would do if you were trying to stand upright. The only difference is is that you've had a heck of a lot more practice standing on your feet than on your hands. Again this is something that will become a lot more natural to you the more you handstand but if you look at my hands in a handstand you can see that my wrists and my fingers are constantly moving and just correcting my balance slightly to keep me upright. It's also worth mentioning hand positioning so you want your hands to be just slightly wider than shoulder width and obviously directly underneath your shoulders hips and ankles but you also want to grip the floor with your fingers and that looks different for everybody. For me my hands tend to be quite flat but some people's fingers are really really bent so just find what works for you. Okay so that's kind of some of the basics around how to handstand but I have made a video in the past about that so I will link it in the card up above if you want to check it out. Now I just want to run through a couple of really really common questions that I get from people on Instagram and YouTube when I post videos of my handstands but also that I experience myself and still do experience as well. First one being wrist pain, is it normal and how do you get rid of it? So firstly yes it is normal to experience wrist pain when you start handstanding even doing things like planks and push-ups for the first time you're going to experience wrist pain and it's one of those things that the more you practice, I keep saying this a lot, but the more you practice the stronger your wrist will get and you won't feel it as much. However that being said if I put in a really long handstanding session my wrists are so so sore. That is why it's really important to make sure that you do some mobility work and also make sure you warm up your wrists before every handstand session. So I'm just running through some basic stretches that I like to do when I'm doing my warm-up but it really is a situation of no right or wrong, just moving your wrists in loads of different directions, putting a little bit of pressure on, starting to build up the mobility as well and then you can also do some wrist strengthening exercises. So a bodyweight one would be a simple plank for example and you can also use a dumbbell to help build up the endurance in your wrists too. Once you feel confident or comfortable or strong enough to get into a chest to wall handstand or a kick up to wall handstand you'll find that be able to stay in that position longer and start building up that endurance as well. I'm just going to quickly touch on shoulders again so we did speak about the stretches and mobility required in your shoulders earlier but I'm just going to run through those here as well just so you can add them into your warm-up. So if you have a bar, simply hanging can be a really fantastic exercise for opening your shoulders and just making sure that your body feels aligned and then of course this one that we ran through earlier as well. The key thing here is just to make sure that you're doing your mobility work and doing your stretches before every single workout you're doing handstands. It is a very small joint that you're putting a lot of pressure through so just look after it and expect that it's probably going to hurt a little bit. Okay so the last thing we're going to talk about is the fear of falling or hurting yourself and this is a very real and valid fear. I know that it's kind of scary to suddenly throw yourself upside down. Now when you're in a handstand the ideal thing is to come out of it the way you came in. That's the safest and the best practice I suppose. You can do this just like in the last clip by slowly increasing the size of your kicks so you're not coming into a full handstand and just starting to push back on your fingertips so you fall back the way you came or if you feel confident to go against the wall you can kick up into handstand and find your balance then push through your fingertips and bring your legs down and make sure you practice with both sides. Now that's the official advice however from my experience this is something what my handstands looked like when I started and I learned how to bail out of my handstand and I think for me that was the best option. You do see some people suggest that you learn how to roll out of it or bridge out of it and I think that's fantastic if you're a trained gymnast but if you're anything like me the most uncoordinated and clumsy person on the planet that's just not going to work. So what I would suggest is to slowly start building up your confidence being upside down whether that be against the wall or in the middle of the room and you can just start with these little kicks like I was doing there and start to build it up over time and you know this video spans 15 minutes or so. Realistically the difference between slightly kicking up and having your feet flex and being able to walk up to a handstand on the wall and then a free standing handstand could be years so please don't get discouraged if it seems like you're not making any progress. But I digress slightly and we are talking about bailing out of a handstand so if you feel like you can do it in the middle of the room then go ahead and start to learn how to bail out and cartwheel essentially out of your handstand but if you're more at the level of maybe walking your hands towards the wall and again this can take a long time to get to so don't get discouraged but you might not be able to get your chest all the way to the wall and you can still learn how to bail and build up that confidence of knowing that you'll be safe if you fall out of it so just walk up to wherever's comfortable on the wall and then you're going to just bring out one leg to the side roll out essentially in a cartwheel and land nice and safely. It really is one of those things that you have to keep practicing and just do to know that you'll be safe and that you'll be capable of falling out and not hurting yourself and once you do it once or twice you'll realize that it's nothing to be scared of and you might be able to start moving away from the wall eventually but just do what works for you and make sure you modify the exercise to help build up your confidence as well. Okay guys I hope you've enjoyed that video and more importantly it's helped you in some way now if you do follow me over on Instagram you'll know that I struggle a lot with the fear mentality in learning new skills and training so for example at the moment I'm trying to learn how to do walkovers and I have a really big mental block there that basically stops me from doing the movement I'm literally just frozen and I don't want to move and this is the same thing as what people experience when they have a fear of falling out of a handstand so I totally understand how you feel so for me the best thing to do is just to break that movement up until I feel safe enough to do it and then at some point you just have to go for it and realize that everything will be okay sometimes you'll fall but that's sometimes a good thing because you'll teach yourself that everything will be fine and then sometimes you'll succeed and you'll realize that you had nothing to be scared of so break the movement up as much as possible and if you have the opportunity to have a spotter that could be really useful sometimes I find it really off-putting having like my boyfriend there or a friend to try and help me just to support me and sometimes it can be really useful as well but it's always an option. One last thing that I found has been really helpful in this area is just visualizing and believing that you can actually do it so if I keep failing at something or I have a doing it I just say to myself in my head before I'm doing it that I've completed it that I've done this before that I know I can do it and that I'm going to be able to do it this time and I also imagine putting myself in someone else's shoes who I know would be able to do it so I have friends who don't have this fear of hurting themselves or falling and I just try to channel that a little bit I'm like okay well I'm going to imagine I would be this person they would just go for it so I'm going to go for it and in that moment I have that energy spirit and usually it really works quite well and I do this for all sorts of exercises I do this for running I do this for pull-ups I do this for handstands so believe in yourself and just trust that you know what you're doing. As I said at the start of this video the beauty of calisthenics and body weight training is that there is no end site so for me there's still so many things I'm working on and that is why I am so passionate about this style of training it's just a never-ending journey and there's always more to learn and more to adapt to. Mastering your body weight and being able to do calisthenics skills is pretty cool and feels amazing but handstanding is just something completely different it is so amazing to be able to teach your body to do something that you have never done before like just completely different to what you've experienced and yes it can be super frustrating and yes it can take a long time but it is so so worth it and for me I find a lot of peacefulness in my handstands like I have to be present I have to be focused on what I'm doing so for me it's a great stress reliever and a way for me to force myself to calm down be present focus on my breathing and just relax because I can be 100 miles an hour all the time and just work work work go go go non-stop so that's why I love to learn handstands and I hope that you'll find that passion too. Okay guys I will leave you there thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you in the next one take care.