Let’s pretend you know nothing about balance.
This guide is a summary of how I would go about describing what you’re supposed to do to balance upside down if I met you for the first time.
It will gather concepts and drills we have created over the last decade and clarify the thread that ties them together.
Chapter I: What is balance?
Balance is the cherry on the cake 🍰
First, it begs reminding that balance is not always the priority. If your kick-up and your alignment skills aren’t good yet, working on balance will delay your progress.
Indeed:
You can hold a few seconds consistently with poor balancing skills and an excellent kick-up, but
You won’t hold more than a second with excellent balancing skills and a poor kick-up.
Balance is movement
There is no such thing as “a point of balance”, where everything magically becomes “easy to hold”.
Sorry: balance is a fight, a fight against the desire to fall, a fight to make your body oscillate around an elusive sweet spot.
Balance = spatial awareness + corrections
We now understand that we won’t be sipping any pina colada upside down soon, and that we will be constantly correcting our position.
To correct your position upside down, you will use your fingers (more on this later).
Knowing how to use your hands will take you a while, and some for perfecting the art of balancing. To do so, you will have to work on the what and the when:
What hand correction should I perform and when?
In other words, it is one thing to know the different actions your hands can perform to hold you upside down… but until you feel where you are in space and what kind of corrections is needed for the scenario you’re facing, you will keep misfiring.
At the root of good balance therefore lies spatial awareness.
To simplify things, spatial awareness is your ability to know where your body is in space. As you may know, this to a huge extent the product of your vestibular system (inner ear) when you are moving upright.
Upside down however, you can bet that this system won’t be enough.
If you rely on “feeling” where your body is in space, you are guaranteed to:
- be completely wrong about it at first. Record yourself and see.
- not be precise enough about it (”my legs are kind of overhead” is not accurate enough to perform precise corrections!)
Your balancing act upside down will have you move in space. Different positions will call for different reactions, with different intensities.
Think of the balancing tools at your disposal as buttons : as long as you don’t feel exactly where you are in space, you will keep slamming all the buttons together indiscriminately - which isn’t the key to consistent, reliable handstands.
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Feeling where we are in space: centred, slightly off-centred or on the verge of falling, and the 50 shades of grey in between these, is absolutely key to know which button to press!
The key: learning to listen 🦻 to your hands 🙌
Your hands are giving your constant feedback as to where you are in space - and what to do (how to correct) to stay in balance.
Distrust your ability to feel that for yourself, and learn to pay attention to what your little hands are screaming.
The Balancing zone
Of course, even if you have honed perfect body awareness and state-of-the-art balancing skills, some positions (most positions actually) will simply be impossible to hold.
There is such a thing as too off-centred (plot twist: it will feel like a tiny inch of a difference at first!)
To reflect that, we will talk of a Balancing zone:
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To hold a handstand, you need to stay in the Balancing zone.
To do so, you will perform the adequate corrections at the right time.
To know which correction to use and at which intensity, you need to feel better and better where you are in space.