Tag Archives | Balance Training

Handstand Balance Training

By admin on September 7, 2012 in Handstands

If you’re looking to improve you balance in the handstand this will be a great article for you.

I’m going to split it up into two subjects. One, is if you’re training to gain the balance just for the handstand itself, that is to be able to hold it stable for a length of time.

The second area is improving your balance by working on more difficult positions and moving between them.

Training Your Balance for the Handstand

In the first case I highly recommend you work on lead up stunts first. My Secrets of the Handstand Quick Start System shows you step by step what you need to do to achieve a 30 second handstand.

By working on moves like the frogstand, headstand, and forearm stand you’ll build up the ability you need. Then you transfer that to balancing right off the wall and finally out in the open.

Training your balance in these easier skills will get you to the handstand faster then just going straight for the handstand. This idea also carries over into the next place to go.

Intermediate and Advanced Handstand Balance Training

Once you have that stable handstand you can begin to move forward. Unfortunately when people learn the handstand (and even before it) they often look at the more difficult moves to go for next. Things like walking up and down stairs, doing presses or the one armer.

Instead the best place to really improve your balance is by sticking with the handstand and changing your position slightly. This video will give you a few ideas to try.

Work on changing your back bend. Work on changing your leg position. Change your arm position or your head. All these are more difficult than the normal handstand position and thus are the best place to go for balance training.

If you’re looking for a whole lot more information I highly suggest picking up Hand Balancing Made Easy which has about 80 different handstand variations.

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Can Hand Balancing Help Doing Backflips?

By admin on May 29, 2008 in Tumbling

It looks like the last email unleashed a fury of new questions. Because of the volume of them I might not get back to you personally, but I’ll try to answer the good one’s here.

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.

Good Luck and Good Hand Balancing,
Logan Christopher

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.