Can Hand Balancing Help Doing Backflips?

Hi Logan,

I’ve been making tremendous progress with my handstands. I can also do a lot of those presses that I’ve seen on your site and on youtube. I did have a question though. Will hand balancing improve things like backflips and other aerial tumbling moves? Will it help me build more nerve when it comes to flips and things like that? I’m very athletic and I can do a backflip, but I was just wondering if hand balance training would make it even better.

Thanks for your tips,

Nelson

Thanks for the question, Nelson. It’s an interesting one that I have given some thought to before. Here’s my take on it.

Any move you work on will only improve your skill in that exact move. There is some carryover between related skills, like doing a frogstand will help somewhat with doing a handstand because of the similar balancing aspect.

But when you have skills that are far apart like hand balancing and a backflip, there is very little relation and therefore carryover. The skills of one will not help the other.

Just because someone is a master of hand balancing doesn’t mean necessarily they can do high flying aerial moves. Or vice versa.

That being said, here’s the flip side (no pun intended). This sort of training helps you to learn control over your own body. To really know it and be able to make it do what you want.

I believe someone with your skills should be able to pick up various other physical skills easier than someone with no experience hand balancing.

No amount of hand balancing will give you the ability to do backflips, you have to work specifically on the skills you want. But learning to control your body one way or another will speed your learning curve.

Plus the strength you build from hand balancing is likely to make many other moves easier as well.

Since this email is already getting long and most of the questions are in depth I’ll have to save them til next time.

But before I go I want to let you know about my other site. Just recently re-launched it and have some awesome things in store.

I like to keep this site well targeted on hand balancing and acrobatics, but that is only one aspect of the much larger world of physical culture.

If you want to learn more of my thoughts on strength training, bodyweight exercise, kettlebells, hand strength, old-time feats of strength, and much more you’ve got to check it out here.

P.S. Go to Legendary Strength and be sure to sign up for the email tips there too to regularly get all the up to date information.