Sebastian Brosche · 8 min · 1,015 words
Previously titled: Handstand Program - Video 1
Hi guys, this is handstand tutorial video number one. I'm going to throw a lot of information on you, so just make sure you're warmed up before you do this. So this is assuming you already did some kind of low class or warm up and now you want to work your handstands. Let's work on three poses today that are building up to the L shaped handstand.
First pose, stretch your leg out in front of you and straighten both legs. So the standing leg is straight and the other leg is straight. If you can't get the foot higher than your hips, don't worry about it. Just make sure your legs are not separating.
You're squeezing your legs together and stretching them apart. So hug your inner thighs and stretch your knees. Lift your chest and push your palms up so your palms are flat as if you were hand standing in the ceiling. Lift your chest, engage your core and switch legs.
So take more or less one, two or three breaths on each side and then you switch. The trick is to be active around your waist. So under your ribs and above your hips, try to be stable there because that will help you to balance in a handstand. But the legs, I'm going to say legs a thousand times because the legs are so important in handstands that you don't bend your knees and relax your legs.
From the front it looks like this. Arms straight, chest up, foot straight out, squeeze your knees, squeeze your core. That's position number one, building up to the L-shaped handstand. Position number two is the exact same pose, but instead of standing on the leg that is straight with the spine, we stand on the other leg.
So in yoga we call it warrior three. You just have to think about keeping the knees straight, arms straight and breathe. And here you can feel that your lower back is working hard and you tend to want to open your hips and this is really bad when you try to handstand. You want to try to have neutral hips.
You should be able to put a big glass of beer on your sacrum and it shouldn't fall any direction. Imagine it's a really tasty beer and that you get to drink it afterwards. So lower your hip so that the hips are flat. Switching sides, stretch the arms forward and usually it looks something like this.
You want it to make it look more like this. Straight and hug your core in. Notice that the two poses feel extremely different. Completely other muscles working hard here than here, but the principle is the same, that you try to squeeze everything tight and stretch out.
The third pose and final pose that builds up to the L-shaped handstand is standing split. I'm quite flexible so for me it's no problem to stand in a standing split and put my forehead down and lift my foot almost like a pure split. I want you to start from a three-legged dog like this. So a down dog and stretch one leg out and then you just walk your feet forward until you feel that your wrists want to start to lift off.
Then this is where you should stop. So if you walk here and you feel that you're losing connection with the floor, then you went too far. So from down dog walk forward until you find a comfortable standing split. Take a couple of breaths there and try to focus on the same things we worked.
Straight knees, neutral hips, straight arms and breathe. This is a nice setup to do handstands. Not here, not here but there. Now you bend the back leg, don't bend it, lower the back foot a couple of times and use these muscles to kick off.
Okay, so you stand on your toes, straighten both knees, work it up and down three, four, five times and then you lift off. Notice that I didn't bend my knees and jump with my back, like I call this rabbit jumps. Happy rabbits jumps like this but happy rabbits can't handstand. You want to be strict and stable and strong and straight here.
So a micro bend in the knee is okay but imagine you're doing it without, you can even try to don't micro bend, just use straight legs. So just momentum, no bending in the knee. And if you do it this way you will not fall over. You don't have the technique to go all the way up like this and find a balancing handstand.
No way you can do this without bending your knee. So if you do it with straight legs you learn to use technique and momentum, technique and precision instead of momentum. So start by working these three, we can combine them, let's do like this. Arms up, leg out, take two breaths, straight knees, active core and then leg out behind you, arms out in front of you, square hips, keep straight and then hands down and three jumps.
Then you stand up and do the second side. Perfect little drill for tightness, length and balance. What's going to kill you is that you're going to forget to breathe, for me it's even harder because I have to talk, but you move and you breathe and that is more than enough homework for you. If you do this little sequence a hundred times that is the minimum, a hundred times on each side so 200 reps of this sequence of three poses, that is the start of handstands because If you want to be able to go all the way up to a handstand and have control on the way up and stay there for 10, 15, 20 seconds it's going to take you a few thousand tries to get there.
So 200 is the bare minimum, do this 200 times and then let's move on to the next video. Good luck guys.
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