Body awareness isn’t fluff. It’s not even optional.
Sure, it’s not the thing you want to train upside down.
It’s not sexy, it won’t make you feel good about your handstand, and, yes, it’s boring.
And still… body awareness is the anchor of your alignment… and the foundation for balance.
Without it, you’ll struggle to breakthrough the 5-second ceiling.
You won’t know why you’re falling, nor how to fix it.
This guide will walk you through how awareness impacts balance (and why you so desperately need to train it!), why can not trust your inner sensations, and how to build an internal map that allows you to hold a handstand on demand and stop relying on luck.
Balance < Alignment
At the core of your ability to balance lies your alignment, ie your position upside down.
My motto is the following:
Good alignment + poor Balancing skills = a consistent 3 - 5 second handstand
Bad alignment + Top notch Balancing skills = inconsistent 1-second handstand with an exceptional 10 second once a blue moon.
To get better at balance, you therefore have to work not only on balance, but also (and sometimes especially) on your alignment.
Alignment, itself, is the understanding of what you need to do with your body, but also the perception of your body in space:
It is one thing to understand what needs to be done…
It’s another altogether to feel it in real time!
In an ideal world…
Handstands would be nothing harder than standing upright.
As you well know after a mere week of trying handstands, this is not true. Yet, a lot of times you train in a way that assumes your body and brain will simply “pick things up”.
This is unfair on you, and will delay progress.
Let’s do the following experiment together:
- stand upright, eyes closed.
- now move your head slowly forward (towards you toes) and backwards (towards your heels).
Not only should you notice that your toes automatically press and relax depending on your position in space…
But you should have little doubt as to how far off-centred your head is at all times.
You can thank your inner ear for that.
The two wrong assumptions we make when we train handstands are:
Our inner ear and overall feedback system is just as proficient upside down
Wrong.
Upside down, your inner ear will give you a blurry input, not precise enough for you to know if you’re sightly off centred or really, really far out.
Without a precise idea of where you are in space, you can not perform the adequate corrections… leading to miscorrections and holds that are cut short.
Our fingers will automatically do what our toes intuitively do.
I wish!
But I’m afraid balancing on our hands may not be written in our DNA. We need to teach our fingers to do what the toes naturally do
TLDR: You can’t trust your feelings yet…
Your actual shape determines what correction you need, but you’re often wrong as to what shape you exactly are in.
Without knowing where you are in space, you won’t know what correction to apply — or when to apply it.
The Three Elements That Build Awareness
To sharpen your awareness upside down, you need to train body awareness, which rests on three pillars: your body-mind connection, your perception of lightness against the wall, and your hand fine-tuned feedback.
1. Visual Feedback
What you think you’re doing is usually far from what you actually are.
Over time, this gap narrows. But it never disappears entirely.
To bridge the gap, record yourself. at least once every week. Compare between sets what you thought you were doing… and reality.
Yes it can be humbling. Put your judgment aside.
2. Wall Feedback
The heaviness of your foot, hips, or both against the wall ALWAYS tells you:
If you’re actually in a good position, or being held by the wall
You need to learn to interpret this weight, for every position you will want to master.
3. Hand Feedback
Remember, your fingers are your toes upside down. They will register weight shifts before your body does, and give you early warnings about an incoming loss of balance.
In a nutshell, they make up for the blurry input your inner ear is providing you with when upside down.
Start listening to them.