Fun drills for lack of shoulder strength for handstands

July 14

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FUN DRILLS: Practice Low Balancing Drills for Handstand Endurance

By Yasuko

July 14, 2022

Press Handstand, Handstand Coach


Practice A Lot!  

But Stop Wasting Your Energy! 

How many hours can you practice handstands per day? Let me guess. You work out for your shoulders, core, and arm strengths on top, right? Well, I'll tell you something. STOP DOING IT!. You better spend your energy on handstands, instead of doing additional exercises. The reason is that you have only a few chances to practice handstands for each session. Putting your energy into other training is A WASTE OF TIME & ENERGY!

Stop doing additional training routines, just do handstand-related movements and muscle education. Through muscle education, you have plenty of chances to build up your strength for necessary body parts. For handstands, you need to go on your arms as much as it is possible for each session.

In this post, you will experience 3 Low Balancing Drills to improve your handstand endurance and body awareness For The Next Level. The next level for you means you will do different shapes of handstand, different styles of entry or exit as same as transition possibility into another movement variation whatever you wish to achieve. There are so many possibilities for creating your handstand style. 

Move Mindfully & Move Slowly

You need to practice carefully with each attempt to go on your arms. Otherwise, you are wasting your energy. I don’t suggest doing a bunch of strengthening workouts besides the handstand practice because if you will be able to handstand, you need to go upside-down as much as possible. To make your practice meaningful, I encourage you to move mindfully, carefully, and with full attention each time you go upside-down and don’t just try, kicking up, moving fast without any attention, struggling a bunch of times. You will end up getting tired quickly and cannot keep your handstand practice a longer time.

Here is my approach: Instead of trying only to go in straight shape (you cannot achieve as a beginner anyway and it is full of struggling), mix a low balance position. You will be better holding longer and can strength your weakness more efficiently because you can take time to feel, move and explore.

Low balance position means you stay in a halfway such as L-shape (legs together), Straddle (legs apart), Tuck (bent knees to the chest), or Headstand (on your head instead on the hands). Because you are not able to stay for a long time in full handstand position yet. To improve your handstand skills you need to hold a handstand longer to adjust fine missing pieces, but if you cannot hold for a long time and fail often, then the chance you can explore with your body for new shape or adjustment, or practice new movement patterns for your new skills is limited. The low balance handstand is one of my favorite drills and that is an amazing tool as  strengthening purpose for handstand skills.

Excercises like below are waste of energy

Because handstand skills require not only strengths of each part of the body, you need to educate your body handstand related movement patterns through repetition and certain techniques. For those techniques, you need to connect and activate the all necessary pieces into the movement patterns. That is the reason why individual muscle exercises have potentially less success in my personal opinion for handstand practice.

Instead, Do a lot of "Low Balanceing Drills" for Your Strengthning

  • Drill 1: Wall + Stair Press
  • Drill 2: Bend Straddle Press & Hold
  • Drill 3: Straddle Press & Hold
YouTube Channel

The Best Way to Learn Handstands is very simple. “Being Addicted”

If you are willing to learn something new, do it again and again until you CAN achieve your goal.


The first thing you need is the BELIEF that it is possible for you.
And the fact that you are here means you already get a chance to achieve your goal.

Practice a lot, practice every day, and recover every day. As I always say, handstand practice needs tremendous energy and you cannot practice a lot per day. Practice on fatigue is not a good idea. That’s why you need to practice every day, maybe a couple of times per day, which I do. Between handstand training, you can work on lower body or dynamic stretches to give your wrists and shoulders a rest to practice on your arms again. Or you practice hours later and start over from warm-up.  


Please feel free to comment with any questions or feedback below. I am happy to hear from you and will do my best to answer your feedback.

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Yasuko

About the author

My name is Yasuko and I'm passionate about handstands, yoga movement and flexibility.  I immersed myself in research a lot to inspire myself & experiment for physical development. This has led to the person I am today.

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