If you’re working on freeing yourself from the wall, you probably have seen or have been told to “take off chest to wall”.
“Sure”, you think do yourself, “but do you realise of freacking scary this is?!”.
Being able to take-off C2W and bail safely from this is indeed a prerequisite to your holding handstands in the middle of the room.
The take-off and dismount indeed mimics what will happen many times freestanding: you will lose control, go beyond what you can fight for, and will need to exit the position safely.
There is hardly any way to circumvent this: however disagreeable, you need to get to a point where the very idea of catapulting your way off the wall doesn’t make your skin crawl.
The good news is that, in a smart training method like ours, we can go beyond the “just do it” approach and design a training regimen that helps you get one step closer to that goal, one day at a time.
In that training plan, enters my Continuous Lightness drill.
The premise is simple: between being glued to the wall and taking off with insolent ease, there are quite a few, discreet steps.
You can indeed assess progress and make sure you always work on the slightly-spicy-but-not-panicky, comfort-zone growing spot through the following three variables:
→ The lighter your foot is on the wall before you trigger the dismount
→ The less you lean back on the support foot before you trigger the dismount
→ Your growing ability to do both a submax hold and a quality-bail within one same set (ie, dedicating less bandwidth to the scary bail itself)