We have defined the blurry term of “pike” as any position where the pelvis is the overshot counterweight.
This gave us the “piked family” of alignments, comprised amongst others of straddle, tuck and diamond.
Depths in Pikes
Like any other position in handstands, when it comes to Pike, there is the good, the bad and the ugly. And as everything else in our method, I need you to understand the different forms and progressions of pike, what distinguishes them from one another, and the relevance of each.
The straight handstand too, had its progressions… But why exactly do we aspire to the straightest line and frown upon closed shoulders?
The Default Pike
Just your priority, not so long ago, was to hold “a handstand”, not the best handstand, your first pikes will compromise here and there on technique.
Remember, in a pike, we want to have the pelvis overshot.
To do so, we have a few tools are our disposal:
a) shoulder flexion. You are still dreaming of the trauma left by the GDBD exercise, and for good reason! Flexing - opening - your shoulders allows the pelvis to travel overhead. To achieve a pike, you will need to do that.
→ If your shoulders aren’t fully open, you will need to open the shoulders as much as possible
→ If your shoulders are fully open, ditto.
→ If you’re hyperflexible, you will need to stop short of your max.
b) lower back arching. When we extend our lumbar spine, our butt starts sticking out. Convenient, since this is precisely what we’re trying to do in a pike!
c) anterior pelvic tilt. When we tilt our pelvis anteriorly, which is intrinsically linked to your lumbar extension, same: the pelvis starts moving more overhead.
We are left, therefore, with the following:
Default pike = flexed shoulders + arched lower back + APT
Notes:
You’ll have different degrees of mobility in your shoulders and spine. Shoulders, spine and pelvis work together to allow you to achieve a pelvis placed overhead, and will make up for each other’s limitations (unless you lack mobility everywhere!).
The Compressed Pike
Now that you have found your recipe (the amount of shoulder flexion, lower back arching and APT you need to cook your default pike), you may want to “improve” that line.
In the world of pikes, we will deem superior a position where:
- the shoulders are open
- the legs are as low as possible
This mostly because it looks better (subjective standards, which you may well decide to ignore, life is too short) and it is much harder (objective standards, which is why I would invite you to compress your pike even if you don’t care about the looks).
Also, the awareness and control you develop to compress your pikes will come handy when it’s time to press, if that’s in the horizon of what you would like to achieve.
In this scenario, flexibility and strength become core components of your training:
Shoulder flexibility: we can not make up for our lack of shoulder flexion anymore - we have to work on opening them up.
Hamstring flexibility: You can only lower your legs as much as your hammies allow for.
Shoulder strength: The lower you bring your legs, the heavier the mechanical load on your shoulders, the harder it will be to keep them open. And if you don’t keep them open, the pelvis starts sagging away from its position, you have to further close the shoulders and planche to save this… et voila, you lost your pike.
Compressed pike = open shoulders + legs as low as possible
My protocol:
Before you start stretching 2 hours per day, consider one of the tenets in our curriculum:
Deal with the cards you have at hands.
Flexibility is easy to blame.
Before aiming for things your body can not achieve yet, I’d like you to make the most of what you can do. I can guarantee that you’re not in as compressed a pike as you can be, in as open a shoulder position as you can hold, simply because you’re not putting enough efforts into it.
In the past, we have labelled this distinction ROM (absolute range of motion - what your body can do, the cards you actually have at hands) and RUM (range of usable motion - how of much of what you can do you’re actually using, what you’re doing with the cards).
Here is an explanation about RUM and ROM. It applies to shoulder flexion, but it can apply to all relevant joints in handstands.
To do that:
- Go in the default pike position you’re trying to compress
- Stack the shoulder closer to the wrist line. This usually helps in creating more room for further compression
- As you stack your shoulders, you’ll have to open the shoulders.
- From there, without compromising your shoulder angle nor your shoulder stack, lower the legs as much as possible.
- Stop when you hit the flexibility or strength bottleneck: you will FEEL how hard the position becomes.
- Breathe, smile and hold - this is your compressed pike.
Build up time here.
Give it weeks and months and see how your default pike becomes naturally more and more compressed.
Only then should you decide to invest in mobility because, indeed, you really don’t like the way it looks or you can see how much of an obstacle this contextual lack of mobility will become for your future goals.
Depths
This idea of bringing our legs lower or higher, and compensating for it with our pelvis positioning (more arching usually helps) and shoulder strength (the lower the legs the harder on the shoulders), gives us the concept of pike depth: you can hold a shallow straddle, as deep a straddle as possible with open shoulders, or something in between.
The Flat Pike
The compressed pike’s big sister, the flat pike, now calls for a very specific, minimalistic recipe:
Flat pike = open shoulders + legs as low as possible - arching - APT
The Flat pike asks us not stop cheating.
We can not use our back and pelvis anymore to stack that pelvis overhead. And remember, the lower you bring your legs, the less the pelvis will want to stay overhead, and the heavier it will become on the shoulders.
The Flat pike brings a new focus on shoulders - how well they can stay open and how much load they can take. For that reason, it is deemed superior in complexity, and is used primarily as one of the ultimate shoulder strength builders.
To achieve it, we want to:
- keep working on our most compressed pikes to keep opening and strengthening the shoulders
- train pelvis isolation as to remove the arch and convert the APT into PPT
- work on compression drills as an accessory
Here again, either you are a purist and you really like the aesthetics of it, or you treat this as a launching ramp to harder skills in your bucket list such as the press and the hollowback… or you just like a challenge!