Sebastian Brosche · 6 min · 924 words
Previously titled: Handstand Program - Video 4
Welcome back to the handstand tutorial program guys. Today we are going to look at a couple of advanced variations which would be switch leg handstand first of all. So I am assuming that you now master the sock squeeze and the knee tap and you are ready to move on to starting to do leg variations in there. We are not doing straight both legs up handstand yet.
That's the most advanced variation for beginners. So instead we are going to learn to keep the inner thighs active and really, really keep our legs straight by doing a switch leg handstand. Looks like this. There is so much timing here.
The rocking backwards and forwards that I do. This motion. The squeezing with the fingers. Absolutely the breath, the flow of the breath is so essential here.
And keeping the legs straight while at the same time modulating the pressure with the front and back of my hips. It's like maybe 15 different muscles, muscle groups working simultaneously. So it's going to take a long time to make it look as smooth as I did it. But that's where we are going to practice today.
You are going to be standing split, get up on your toes, bend your knee a little bit, jump up and switch. And usually it's going to be, in the beginning it's all going to be hard landings because you don't switch your weight forward enough. And if you switch it too far forward you are going to have to move your hand. So the trick is to adjust the intensity and find the right amount of pressure.
Practice, practice, practice. Lift one leg, switch. Not too fast, not too slow and don't start bending your knees. Keep the legs straight.
When you have done this a few hundred times, at one point you are going to come up with this on your own. You are going to invent it yourself. Don't let me spoil it. But it's the same for everyone.
So when you get up and you find the balance you are going to be curious to see can I switch two times and then come down. But of course please don't try that now. At least give yourself 200 tries with switch legs before you expect this to happen naturally. Instead of rushing it and being disappointed, put in the work and enjoy the feeling when the spontaneous development comes to you.
Instead of you chasing it, you let the progress chase you because you put in all of the work. So switch leg handstands, keep the toes spread, walk backwards and forwards, modulate the pressure with the fingers and there you have it. Another thing you can do from the split leg handstand is to come up and cross your legs and this would be a step on the way to a full straight leg handstand. It's not really a straight leg handstand but it's like a switch leg.
You kind of come up but then you land with the same foot again or let's say it like this. It's like the foot tap but with straight legs. Okay look at this. Instead of doing the knee foot to knee tap, I jump up, I cross my ankles and I land again like this.
I go up, cross and down. If you feel like you're falling over, you can do it lower as well. You don't have to go all the way up but try to keep this leg super straight, the top leg straight and when you feel that you have balance, you try to do this and come down. Alright, boop and down.
Now you start to feel when you work on stuff like this, this type of handstands, you're focus is not all over the place, it's concentrated to a tunnel between your hands and your head. When you have the focus of your gaze, in old school yoga they call it drishti, the focus of the gaze and the breath, the flow of the breath, even if you're in the bullpen and all the famous guys are there, the guy who's going to fight you has a million patches on his gi, he has so many titles of tournaments you've never heard of and you're really nervous and you're all over the place. You throw in a few handstands and just focus, don't care about people taking pictures or not, it's all going to fall away and you actually try to hold the handstand with your music in your ears or whatever. It's going to laser beam focus your attention to one thing.
That kind of focus is what you want when you're going to meet this guy and he's going to pull you into 50-50 and wrap the leg around, then you need to not be all over the place, you want to be focused and start doing the jiu-jitsu you know and tear him apart. For me, handstands is a way to stop being all over the place, hey guys, where's my water bottle, where's my passport, handstand makes everything connected. So now you have two more tools to practice your balancing handstand, you have the switch leg and you have the ankle crosser, we call it the ankle crosser from now on, I just invented it, crossing your ankles and coming down again. So switch leg handstand and crossing your ankles landing on the same foot.
Good luck with this guys, see you in the next video.
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