Key Concepts for Bailing

Fear of falling from handstand is a very natural thing to have. Its one of the most common issues among beginners, yet one that can also be a bit divisive. Some people never have this fear and it can be easy for them to say “its easy, just do X and you don’t need to be afraid”. It can also be hard to relate to this fear as a teacher since most who teach have been on their hands for a very long time.

The most important thing out of all to know if you are experiencing this is; its normal. You aren’t stupid or irrational for feeling scared of falling over. Your body does not have the experience of a safe and effortless falling technique yet and will hence tell you this can be dangerous.

This bail session is designed to work around this fear. This series of exercises is designed to be worked on without a spotter, but know that some of the steps can be uncomfortable if you are scared. Gradually working through this discomfort in manageable steps is key.

The goal of this session is to teach you to how to cartwheel out of handstand. This method is one of the easier ones to learn and it has several big benefits to it:

• You never lose the view of the floor
• You come down on your feet every time
• It can be done out of nearly any handstand variation
• Can be broken down into parts you can train separately for better focus
• Once it is mastered, other methods such as “twisting down” are quite easy to learn

This is the first step before you even begin to train this. Since we are going to learn a cartwheel method to fall with, we want to have a chosen side to do this on. Its all great to learn cartwheels on both arms of course, but for the scope of this training we want the bailing drills to be trained on one side only. The reason for this is that we want to make it into an entirely automatic response to the weight moving over. You don’t want to have to “think” about which side to fall to as you fall, it should just happen in that one safe way you get to know very well.

Cartwheels are underrated when it comes to their utility for handstands. It is an entirely separate skill, but it teaches us how to transfer weight between the hands which is very important for safe falls from handstand. As such, they are one component of our bailing session – but our intent with cartwheels is different than what you may be familiar with.

The most important thing about this part of the practice is that you don’t judge your cartwheel by gymnastic standards when learning it. Your cartwheel might be crooked, feel heavy and uncoordinated but that is fine. If you find cartwheels complicated, our breakdown of it here will be useful for your learning of it. The cartwheels do not need to look clean and fancy at first! Our goal is to give your body a frame of reference for how to transfer weight between the hands. Take your time with it and you will see improvements over some weeks at it.

If you find it scary, keep your body diagonal at first and concentrate on getting the order of feet and hand placements correct. As you get more comfortable you can go higher and higher with the hips. Legs bending is also normal in the start when learning it but this will be easier to fix once you have the basic movement pattern down.

Choose one side to practice these on here. Try to feel out which side is the most intuitive and stick with that (learning cartwheels both sides is of course great, but for the scope of this specific practice it can be smart to stick to one side).

While we believe the material in this session will greatly benefit your ability to safely exit a handstand – we don’t expect the effects to be instantaneous.

Getting comfortable with falling is about controlled, gradated exposure.  The more often you fall and land safely, the less scary it will become.

So we encourage you to run this session multiple times, incorporating it into your weekly training routine.  Where should you slot it in?  We’d recommend after you warm up, but before any endurance or conditioning work.  Bailing is a skill, which means you should train it when you have the most mental acuity and physical ability to keep your reps quality and yourself safe.