Handstand Training 101

Turn your world upside down with handstand training!

If you want a more challenging way to train your whole body, with a heavy emphasis on your upper body and supporting “core” muscles … then you should try handstand training!

What Is Handstand Training?

Handstand training takes many different forms. As the name implies, it’s training while “standing on your hands” …

If I had to break it up, I’d say there’s probably three main types of handstand training …

• Pushups – where you’re doing various pushing/pressing exercises while on your hands …
• Walking – where you’re just walking around or variations of this on your hands …
• Holds – where you’re holding the handstand positions for time …

Why Is it Awesome?

There’s a lot of reasons:

• Strength – Holding your bodyweight overhead is a great strength builder for your upper body
• Core – you’re forced to use your abs and back, and all your core muscles (especially your serratus muscles) to stabilize and keep your torso and legs upright
• Coolness – let’s face it, not a lot of people can do handstand stuff, and you’re cool if you can

How To Get Started

The easiest way to get started with handstand training is to just go put your hands on the ground next to a flat wall, and kick your feet up over your head.

Almost everyone I know who does handstand stuff, started with this progression, because it’s super easy. Still too hard?

Then you could try the even easier progressions that beast skills shows on his “how to do handstand pushups” page.  Basically think of your arms as the platform, and you are going to slowly start putting more and more of your bodyweight on them, starting with your feet on the ground (pushup) to feet on a chair … then a little higher chair/table … then throw your feet overhead on a wall … then eventually nothing.

Here’s a pretty decent video on how to work up to handstand pushups too:

Where To Go From Here …

Once you’ve mastered the handstand up against the wall … and you can hold yourself up for 30 or so seconds, you’ll probably want to to start trying to do un-assisted handstands.

You can just kick your feet up overhead (outside in a yard where you’re not going to fall over and break tables or little children) and try to hold yourself there.

The cool thing about learning it this way, is you’ll actually learn to walk around on your hands before you get the un-assisted handstand thing down, because as you start to fall forward or backwards or to the sides, you can just reposition your hands — walking on them — to keep your balance and try to keep you feet over your head.

Simply practice this as often as possible and you’ll have pretty good balance on your hands in no time. When I was younger, I spent pretty much a whole summer doing handstand type crap like this because I watched a movie called “only the strong” with capoeria and I thought it was uber cool.

You’ll Love The Benefits!

The result? I can walk on my hands decently now (although I have to walk on my balled up fists now which kills my balance because my right wrist won’t bend all the way back due to an un-looked-after-kicking incident). And my serratus muscles still “pop” out when I lift my arms over my head (this is also because when I started lifting weights I focused on the overhead press instead of exercises where you lay on a bench, like the bench press.)

So if you wanna have some fun with your training from now on, be sure to try some handstand training stuff!