Day 7
It’s not about strength, it about technique… or is it??
It’s been one week since you started your handstand journey with us. While it might seem like we’ve covered a lot of ground (and we have), one week is hardly enough time to truly develop the strength or technique you’ll need for a solid handstand.
So if you have been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the content this week, that’s ok! The concepts we are introducing to you each day are things you can train and apply for weeks to months and still make gains. But what kind of gains? That’s what we’ve written about today.
Strength
Strength within physical activity can be seen as the ability to produce power. This is a very blunt and simple definition, but we have to remember that bodily strength will be rather specific to a certain movement, activity or sport. For example, a gymnast, powerlifter and football player might all be good at producing power, but in very different ways.
For this reason it’s useful to consider strength to be highly context dependent. It’s the ability to produce power in a specific movement or coordination that makes it valuable. One of the reasons I believe strength has gotten a bad rep is that people often (wrongly) associate strength with gym goers who “just lift weights to get big muscles”.
On top of this, many handbalancers are not very muscular looking and also very technically proficient, which further leads to the idea that strength is a redundant capacity for handstands. The big misunderstanding here is that the handbalancer IS very strong, but at a very particular skill. They don’t need a 200kg squat to balance on their hands, so their body’s aesthetic will develop differently than someone who trains to squat that much weight. (As a side note, handstands are also very dependent on flexibility which allows us to reduce the amount of energy needed to execute certain moves.)
Technique
Technique can be seen as the execution of a task in a specific and planned manner. It’s a cornerstone of disciplines like circus, gymnastics or Olympic weightlifting. Both the sleek look of a professional handbalancer or a perfectly executed flip exudes technical perfection. “It looks so easy” you often hear when a task is done with so little seeming effort. There is truth to this too! When a skill is so well honed, it doesn’t take as much effort, the coordination and experience means it requires less power than what a beginner would need.
A handstand will simply use less energy per second for an experienced balancer than for a beginner. However, it still requires contraction of the appropriate muscles, which is an expression of strength. For the beginner, just holding the weight up for 10 seconds might be hard! This is not because they “lack technique” necessarily, they just do not have the strength to hold their body with ease, yet. Being strong enough to attempt the skill at all comes first, technique comes later.
The interplay between the strength and technique
The relationship between strength and technique is like a dance, one will follow the other. But which one leads switches frequently. You need to condition your body to get strong enough to execute a solid shoulder position in your handstand (strength leads). Then, as you get more comfortable holding yourself, you notice you wobble less and have more mental energy you can focus on details (technique leads). These details make the execution of the placement and balance a bit easier and more effortless – until you’re on your hands for so long fatigue sets in. At that point strength takes the lead again, and endurance drills may become a focus for a time. This interplay between emphasising physical adaptation and then technical proficiency will cycle continuously not only as you pursue higher skills in handbalancing, but even in maintenance work or coming back from time off.
Regardless of where you are in your handbalancing journey, this interplay between the pure physical capacity to “do the thing” and the skill training itself both matter. But it’s important to remember that when learning a new handstand skill such as your first handstand, a press or a one-arm, you will very likely need to build up some of the specific strength needed too.
Let’s get back to developing both strength and technique with today’s training session:
For this session we first repeat the turning drills. If you feel comfortable enough, try to cartwheel down from the wall. If it feels scary, keep working on the turning drills. It might take some time to build the safety and courage to actually go for the cartwheel down.
Next, we concentrate on endurance. This does not mean you need to go to the extremes to get any results, but you want to push a little bit past the physical comfort zone.
- A: Wall Turns
- 5-10 total attempts. Rest as needed between attempts.
- B (optional): Cartwheel Out at the Wall
- 5-10 total attempts. Rest as needed between attempts.
- C: Chest-to-Wall Handstand or Incline Body Line Drill
- If you are comfortable being inverted choose the chest-to-wall handstand, if not then do the incline body line drill at a challenging, but secure angle.
- 3-5 sets
- Close to maximal hold
- Rest as needed between holds
- 2 min rest after all sets
- D: Stick Flexion
- 3 sets
- 15 second hold followed by 5 lifts
- 60 second rest between sets