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 Read Working up to a Handstand Part one.

 

Hi and Welcome back.

 

If you have followed the instructions in Part one,  you should now be able to kick up and land in a handstand against the wall. You will probably be a bit wobbly but, you’ll be practicing often and your body will be rapidly learning the skill of maintaining the handstand!

 

So, lets get straight on with it and learn how to go from just kicking up into a handstand to completing a full handstand push up.

 

The next step is to build your strength and skill by extending the length of time that you can hold the handstand position.

 

 

 

 

Our target is going to be one minute. If you can already do that, great, move on. If not then you are going to work up to it by stringing together handstands to make up the full one minute. Each time count how many tries it takes you and the next time, try to reduce that number. When you can do the full one minute in one go, you are ready to move on.

 

Just holding the handstand position without trying to do a handstand press up, is a great way to build up the strength and confidence in the position whilst teaching your body the skill and developing the body awareness necessary.

 

Whilst holding this position, practice keeping your body rigid and straight, point your toes, tense your abs and glutes and try to let that tension spread over your whole body.

 

You can also make holding the handstand position more interesting by lifting yourself up by shrugging your shoulders whilst keeping your arms locked.

 

 

The next step in the handstand push up practice is to gradually build up your strength by slowly working up to a complete press and we will do this in two ways that you can mix into your practice as you wish.

 

The first technique is to start doing mini handstand press ups. You lower yourself a small distance then press yourself back up. Start with a tiny amount and gradually do down further. Don’t try and rush it, the goal is to make small improvements every time so, so long as you go down slightly further each time then you are progressing and you will reach your goal!

 

The second technique is to get in the handstand press up position and to lower yourself down to the point where you are not sure if you could lift yourself back up from. Then, you simply hold yourself in that position, part way through your handstand push up.

 

After holding it there for a while, slowly lower yourself down (as slowly as you can) until your head touches the ground and comes to rest. Try to push yourself off the ground here (don’t worry that you can’t, you just want to get used to trying). Then bring your feet down and kick up to do another rep.

 

The number of reps that you do is determined by how fresh you feel. Never tire yourself out as you will be doing multiple sets through out the day. I would recommend reps in the 1 – 3 range for this and as many as you feel comfortable with for the mini handstand push ups but probably no more than about 5.

 

 

Again, the important thing is consistency, Keep practicing and aim to make small improvements every time.

 

To do this you will have to make sure that you don’t over tire yourself as if you do, you will need to spend time recovering before you can improve again.

 

So, train at least twice a day, more if you can and do just a couple of reps at a time and pretty soon, you’ll be knocking off perfect handstand push ups!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: balance, exercises, Handstand Push Up, skill, strength, training, tutorial

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.