How To Do A Handstand: Why Not Stacking The Hips Properly Can Derail Your Progress

If you have not read:

The Ultimate Guide to Handstand

If you’re looking for the optimal handstand experience, I encourage you to take a look at that article first, then come back to this one. If you don’t have time for now, that’s ok, you’ll still get plenty of useful & actionable tips from this one. Enjoy the article!

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Have you ever tried to learn something new?

And been told this?

“It’s simple, just do x, then do y, and follow that up with z, and you should get it.”

It’s painful.

When an “expert” starts with the phrase “It’s simple” right?

You think to yourself

“oh simple, right….”

Then you just feel dejected and unmotivated and even wonder if YOU’RE just dumb?

Truth is, you’re probably just stuck on one incy wincy tiny little thing.

And if you could just get that one magic glimmering piece of advice, it would change it all.

I know the feeling.

You’re a Superhero, Just Not the One You Think

Imagine for a second you’re Batman.

You’re stuck in a bind, backed into the corner by the bad guys.

You think to yourself, “No problem I got this, I’ll just blast a spider web at him and BLAM, make my escape”

You stick your hand out to entangle him in a web…and nothing happens. Huh?

Unfortunately you’re not Spiderman, but luckily, you are Batman. So you find a way to escape anyway.

You get the picture though right?

Ok.

Moving on…

When learning how to do a handstand, the most common roadblock is:

Not actually knowing your position in space.

This is the fundament position of balance:

Stacking the hips over the shoulder over the wrists.

Once you get comfortable enough jumping up to handstand, knowing your position in space is critical.

The sooner you understand this, the better.

Developing bad habits holds you back even further than not practicing at all.

Here’s why:

You have to UNDO your bad habits first before you start learning properly again.

And we all know the phase:

“Old habits die hard”

Most students think…

“Cool, I’m not scared to jump anymore. I’ll just do it a million times and I’ll get it”.

Wrong.

It’s time to start watching yourself closely. 

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I feel excess pressure on my lower back every time I jump up to handstand?
• Do I “thud” on the ground every time I land?
• Do I feel heavy when I jump?
• Do I look like a horse when I jump?
• Where do I feel the weight in my hands?

These are symptoms of not properly stacking the hips. This is how you learn a handstand.

How to Discipline Yourself to Stack the Hips

Let’s put good ol’ technology to use.

Take some videos of yourself jumping.

Like I’m doing here:

Watch the positioning of your hips in space closely. Do they actually stack over the shoulders? Probably not.

This is a problem.

I watched a student a few days ago kick up to handstand and I told him,

“Make sure you’re focusing on shifting the hips forward enough and less on springing off the feet. Ok?”

He said “sure” and started jumping and claimed, “My hips were there, I felt them.”

When in reality, they weren’t at all.

My eyes were more reliable then his sense of feel. That’s a problem, too.

Part of developing a killer handstand is developing a killer sense of feel.

This is what I call 360 degree vision. It’s essential for learning to float around on your hands effortlessly.

Now go back to your video camera.

Record yourself jumping 10 times and watch really closely the positioning of your hips.

Are they actually forward enough?

More importantly, did you think your hips were stacked when they actually weren’t?

That’ll hold students back for years.

In this case, a simple proprioception tweak makes all the difference.

Now Use a Camera

Grab a friend and have them snap a few photos for you.

I call this the 3-photo-challange.

Ready?

Have your friend snap a photo of yourself at the peak of every one of your handstand jumps.

Then challenge yourself to go a little bit further with your hips every time. 

But Brian, “Why can’t I just use a video camera for this??”

Here’s why:

In order to see improvement in a photo, you’re jumps must be deliberate. You can’t just get lucky with a photo, YOU actually have to concentrate and consciously move your hips forward. The camera just holds you accountable.

Generally, when you think your hips are stacked, you can move them forward another 2-3 inches. This is a hard principle for students to grasp.

Until you develop a Spiderman-like sense of feel, a second set of eyes on you is pure gold.

EVERYONE gets stuck somewhere with handstand. It’s how quickly you can figure out WHY your stuck is what’ll separates you from all the students who’ll never learn it. 

The Weight in your Hands is Wrong

Jump up to handstand a few times.

Where do you feel the weight in your hands?

If you feel the weight of your body in the heels of your hands you doing it wrong.

But even more importantly, this happens when you don’t properly stack your hips.

Here’s what you should feel in your hands:

• The weight distributed equally amongst the perimeter of the hand
• With a slight bias toward the inner hand (the thumb and index finger)
• A suction cup like feeling
• Almost as if the center of the hand wants to lift off the floor (this is called hasta bandha) 

If you don’t feel that, it’s one of the following:

• Your hips don’t stack all the way so you can’t engage your core properly
• You don’t know what it’s like to actually grip the floor with your fingers
• Your fingers are weak

Sometimes, details are excruciatingly important. Work on your strengthening your fingers.

Here’s how:

Hold Plank on you fingertips for as long as you can.

And here’s what you should feel while you’re doing it:

• Not too much pressure in the thumb
• Not the very tips of your fingers smashing into the floor
• The fingers all drawing up and in toward one another
• Imagine trying to shoot a fireball or an ice beam out of the palm of your hand
• Your forearms “twitching” a little bit
• Your core engaging more than normal

You might think to yourself, “I’m too weak to hold myself on my fingertips.”

Modify plank with your knees down then hold yourself on fingertips.

Notice, that when your fingers are active, your core muscles always engage more.

The trick is to recreate the same feeling when your hands are flat on the floor. Your core is stronger than you think and subtle changes in your body will prove that to you.

Make sense?

Maybe you do have strong fingers? Look at the hips.

STACKING YOUR HIPS AND KNOWING THEIR POSITION IN SPACE AT ALL TIMES IS SO IMPORTANT.

Most handstand bad habits form simply from not stacking the hips all the way and thinking they’re stacked.

What If You’re Scared?

Truth is, students are just terrified of jumping high enough so they’ll do things like this instead:

• Kick up like a horse
• Bend their lower back 
• Bend their knees and send their feet overly far forward

Students like to counter-balance with any part of their body EXCEPT their hips.

Learn How to Fall

I’ve never seen a student learn handstand without falling over.

Learning a SAFE way to bail out is super important for the learning process.

They’re are really only two ways to fall:

• Flip over into wheel (scary)
• Cartwheel off to the side

Anyone who’s serious about learning handstand learns to fall.

While I don’t recommend everyone learns to flip over into wheel initially, cartwheeling out is doable.

Brian, “Why don’t you recommend flipping over into Wheel?”

There’s other physical limitations involved and if you land flat on your back you can actually hurt yourself.

I make all my personal clients learn to fall over in some capacity.

I make them jump up with the intention of falling over purposely. Repeatedly falling over safely reduces the amount of fear a student experiences.

It’s magic. When fear goes away all of a sudden hips seem to mysteriously stack. Coincidence? Don’t think so.

Pay Attention to How you Jump 

It’s tempting to not think and just jump.

It’s super tempting to jump like a horse.

Or a donkey.

Do you know HOW you jump?

Have you ever even thought about it?

Start now.

Here’s what you’re trying to identify:

Slow controlled jumps and mindless wild jumps.

The common knowledge is jump until you get it. Not true.

It takes more than jumping repeatedly to nail handstand.

Just like trying to make a hole in a wall.

Yes, you can bash your head against it a hundred times to make a hole, but it’s probably not the most efficient way and it’s not very good for your head.

Most students just focus on HOW to balance.

Savvy students focus on HOW they jump to get into a position where they COULD balance.

See the difference?

Not being aware of how you jump up is a big mistake.

Let’s take a Standing Split jump as an example:

Students like jumping to handstand from standing splits because they can swing their top leg and gain momentum.

Occasionally, they swing their leg high enough and occasionally they balance.

Wrong. Wrong. WRONG.

I can turn occasionally into consistently by tweaking one thing.

Your awareness.

As a student, you know your core is important, but you don’t use it enough. And you’ll choose momentum over your precious core every chance you get, subconsciously.

Change that by:

Engaging your core BEFORE you jump.

And guess what?

You won’t have to jump nearly as hard and you’ll be in control.

And make sure you don’t swing your top leg. Don’t turn that into the momentum leg. Not good.

Engage your core every time before you jump. It’ll make you more consistent.

Your success in handstand starts with your preparation.

Let’s point out the subtle things you’ll feel if you’re doing this right:

• Balanced weight distribution in your hand
• Fingertips digging into the floor
• Weight distributed equally throughout the arm
• Not just in the joints
• Your hips feel like they’re on a track
• Your shoulders don’t burn
• Your traps aren’t clinched

The Banana Stand

As if learning when to engage your core was enough right?

Your spine turns into a banana when you learn to balance wrong.

Yes, it’s possible to learn to balance wrong.

You look like a non-committed scorpion, although the difference is enormous.

In an actual Scorpion Pose you’re bending in your upper back and controlling with your shoulder blades.

In a banana stand, it’s your lower back bearing all the weight. Youch!

Most students banana simply because:

• They’re scared to stack the hips
• They don’t know how to engage their core properly

Fix it by doing this:

• Go use a wall
• Face the wall and set your hands up 3 or 4 inches from the wall
• Don’t give yourself very room (this is important)
• Now try and kick up
• If you’re used to banana’ing, this is going to be hard
• Repeat this jump 9-10 times before you start your regular practice

This is a useful technique to retraining the hips to stack. As you can see, bad things happen to your handstand when the focus isn’t on getting the hip placement correct.

With regards to my Handstand Roadmap, bad habits form when things are practiced out of order.

Some Other Minor Handstand Roadblocks (But Cause Major Problems)

Finger Placement

HOW you place your fingers on the ground determines WHERE weight will be distributed in your hand.

News to you?

Keep reading…

The common mistake is to bring the fingers all the way together.

Don’t do this. You’ll lose the control in each individual finger and the weight will move into the heels of your hands.

You don’t want that.

Think about this:

You’re not just balancing on the ground with your hands, you’re gripping the floor with your hands.

Gripping the floor is like gripping a cup.

Imagine how hard it would be to hold the cup if you couldn’t wrap your fingers around it?

You lose that same control if you scrunch the fingers together.

Do this:

Spread your fingers naturally wide. Enough so that each individual fingertip can “claw” into the ground.

However, overspreading the fingers also causes problems, especially the thumb and index finger. 

Students love to spread their thumbs super wide. It’s not necessary.

It will cause instability in your arms and most noticeably it makes you feel as if each arm is working individually rather than both arms working as a unit.

Not to mention this type of instability overburdens the traps and shoulders. They’ll take over instead of your core if you give them the opportunity too.

Hyperextending Elbows

Hyperextending elbows is a sign that your arms are weak.

In the Handstand Roadmap Stage 1 is to strengthen you arms, but students ignore that crucial part.

You NEED to strengthen your arms to have a serious go at handstand.

But it’s a chicken or the egg kind of thing.

Here’s why:

If your elbows hyperextend, you avoid using your arms. So they get weaker.

You can’t just start flinging yourself into handstand.

You MUST strengthen your arms first.

Hyperextending ruins your handstand like this:

• Puts an extreme amount of pressure in your wrists
• Puts an extreme amount of pressure in your shoulder joints
• Prevents the core from working properly
• Makes you feel unstable
• Creates a constant fear of collapsing 

It’s In The Details

For the most part, it’s simple hangups that cause major problems.

Learning handstand presents unforeseen roadblocks.

It’s how you deal with those roadblocks that determines how you come out on the other end.

Handstand is not as complicated as you initially think, but there’s so many moving parts it’s easy to get lost in the details. 

Yes, the details do matter, but fixing the obvious things that you’ve avoided will move you closer to your goal.

In this case, understanding the positioning of your hips is crucial to your development in handstand.

Fixing the obvious will naturally fix all the minor (but important) details.

Grab my Handstand Roadmap and get started.

Click Here For The Handstand Roadmap!