Glossary

Backward is where the heels of your hands is pointing.

The balancing zone refers to the space in which you can balance once you have achieved a viable alignment. Your balance in the balancing zone is predicated by the accuracy of your corrections and you not leaving the functional alignment you had achieved.

Balancing distance refers to a distance between the hands and the wall when practicing back to the wall that is too far for you to be able to land in your chosen shape softly against it, but close enough for the wall to catch you should you lose control. It is a way for us to practice assembling the handstand puzzle together and getting used to not over-relying on the wall and divorcing it.

The Breaking Zone is the small space overshot of the Balancing Zone where you might find yourself if you don't kick up far enough or if you make a balancing mistake. In the Breaking Zone, you can still recover your way back into the Balancing Zone if you perform the right macro correction at the right time.

Counterweights refer to your pelvis, your right leg, and your left leg. They are labeled as such because it is impossible to have all three of them before vertical undershot or past vertical overshot except in exceptional circumstances like planching or hollowbacking. On your road to a consistent 30-second handstand, unless you have a tendency to planche, you should always make sure that the counterweights are balancing each other. The way to know that is that at the wall, you will have found lightness when the counterweights are in the right position.

We define open and closed shoulders through the angle we can see from a sideway view, between your torso and your arms.

This angle reflects your range of motion at the shoulders in shoulder flexion.

Draw a line between the centre of your hands and your shoulders.

And a second line between your shoulders and your pelvic bone.

If the angle between both line is less than 180 degrees, you have closed shoulders.

You can absolutely achieve handstands with closed shoulders.

The one thing you shouldn’t worry about in handstands

Internal cueing: A cue that directs focus to their own body movements or muscles.

External cueing: A cue that directs focus toward the effect of the movement in the environment, not the body itself.

Neutral cueing: A cue that provides direction without drawing attention specifically inward (body) or outward (environment). It’s more contextual or task-based.

Bringing the legs closer to the chest

A Dysfunctional shape is a handstand alignment against the wall that you will not (now, or ever) be able to hold freestanding.

For instance, if you have both your pelvis and both legs against the wall, B2W, you are more than likely to be unable to take off from that position.

This indicates that if you were to do this freestanding, you would invariably fall overshot out of balance.

Eversion refers to the outward movement of the hands that they start performing the closer you get to the timber zone. As your shoulders move forward and backwards, which can either be done actively or passively as a result of what your fingers are doing, there will be a lateral movement of the hand, inwards when you go forward and outwards with the index finger lifting when you go backwards.

Shoulder flexion is this big bad word that barely makes sense when we are standing on our feet - and therefore, with so many things to think of when we are upside down, including our survival, becomes incomprehensible once our feet are in the air.

However, it is by far the most important movement pattern to grasp in your first year of handbalancing. Let’s see why and break it down step by step.

One does not need to be an expert in biomechanics to understand that if you were to move your pelvis and your torso away from your feet, as you stand up, you would fall out of balance. In fancy terms we would refer to those as your centre of mass and your base of support.

To balance still on our feet with as much ease as possible, we need to keep our pelvis over our feet.

To balance on our hands, we need to keep our pelvis over our hands*.

(*at least in the vast majority of handstand shapes and certainly in the totality of handstand beginner variations).

Shoulder flexion is what you do when you bring your arms overhead. If you are not too much into anatomy, this may sound counterintuitive, and you may be tempted to call that an extension or something.

Doesn’t really matter, call it whatever you want. What matters to us is that you can perform it in a closed-chain context, that is, with your hands glued to the floor.

There is one thing you know for sure about handstands: your hands are on the floor, bearing all your weight.

If we flip our character above, with the same body shape, so that it had their hands on the floor, we would end up with a weird push-up position, at best:

Duh. Obvious.

Now, you know, intuitively, that the pelvis and the legs have to be overhead.

But realise that if we only move the joints related to the former or the latter, we would still not have a handstand.

Instead, if we didn’t change anything to the rest of the body, but performed shoulder flexion, here is what would happen:

Tadaam.

Not good enough for cirque du soleil.

But a handstand nonetheless.

Looking at this progression, you can realise that:

→ as we perform shoulder flexion, the angle between the arms and the torso increases, or opens. That is why I will refer to this in class as “shoulder opening”. This is also why people who don’t have the mobility to bring their arms at a 180 degree angle at the shoulders will sometimes be referred to as “closed shoulders”.

But don’t let the Internet bully you. There is a fix for that.

→ Shoulder flexion is paramount to aligning our centre of mass over our hands or, in a less pompous fashion, to bringing our butt over our hands. Much more so that a pelvic tilt, an extended leg or a pointed toe.

→ Shoulder flexion with our arms in the air (what we call an open-chain context) feels easy. In a close-chain context (hands glued on the floor), not so much.

→ As we perform shoulder flexion, a host of other movements seem to happen consequently in our bodies:

Those are all relevant cues when you are trying to tap into that movement pattern.

Let me rephrase that: once you are upside down, screaming “I am going to flex my shoulders now” hardly does the trick because, again, it’s a weird one. But bringing our chest in, ie towards the wall in you are holding yourself chest to the wall, may make more sense.

Try to think about what is happening in your own body when you do this movement.

How would you describe that to a 3 year old? Where is the sensation located?

Whatever you find, add this to your thesaurus: this is the cue, your cue, that I want you to summon back to consciousness whenever you hear “open your shoulders”, whether on the floor, back to the wall, chest to the wall or freestanding.

Shoulder flexion works great, IF it doesn’t happen at the expense of what precedes it in our handstands, namely: the stacking of the first axis.

Your hands are stuck on the floor: they are going nowhere.

Your shoulders though... may be tempted to lean forwards or, god forbid, backwards, as you perform shoulder flexion. This is natural, but will lead to the following

The shoulders come out of axis, and so does the pelvis.

Good luck saving that.

The First Stack is the alignment of your shoulders over the centre of your hands.

When your shoulders start leaning backwards, you lose the first stack. This makes your hands less “heavy” on the floor, signaling the imminent loss of balance.

Forward is where your fingers are pointing.

A functional shape is a handstand line that can be held freestanding.

Not everything you can do with a wall or with a spotter will be transferrable in a freestanding context.

Hence the need to practice very mindfully when against the wall so that your hard work with it ends up paying off in your freestanding ability.

Bringing the shoulders so far backwards they’re before the wrist line

A fundamental gymnastics position where the entire body is held in a curved, tightly braced shape — the spine is slightly flexed, ribs pulled down, pelvis tucked under. Not to be confused with Hollowbacking

The Lasagnas refer to a mental model to remember the four pillars of an efficient and controlled kick-up, namely momentum, alignment, tension, and fingers.

Micro-corrections refers to the balancing corrections you operate at the hand and finger levels to hold yourself in balance.

Macro-corrections refer to the bigger movements one has to perform when they have left the balancing zone in an attempt to go back into it using traditionally either or a combination of elbow, shoulder, pelvis, and leg movements.

We define open and closed shoulders through the angle we can see at your shoulders.

Draw a line between the centre of your hands and your shoulders.

And a second line between your shoulders and your pelvic bone.

If the angle between both line is 180 degrees, you have open shoulders.

Pingponging is what you do when you take-off and come back to the wall several times in a row.

Bringing the shoulder blade away from each other

Bringing the shoulders so far forward they’re over the fingers

ROM is the acronym for Range of Motion.

The one joint whose ROM matters to use the most in handbalancing is the shoulder.

If you have closed shoulders, your ROM will be a bit constrained: you won’t be able to lift your arms overhead as to achieve a 180 degree angle between your torso and your arms.

If you have open shoulders, your ROM will be optimal for straight handstands.

The Second stack is the alignment of your pelvis over the shoulders.

It is mainly predicated by the degree of shoulder flexion - extension in your shoulders.

The Timber Zone is the small space undershot of the Balancing Zone where you might find yourself if you don't kick up far enough or if you make a balancing mistake. In the Timber Zone, you can still recover your way back into the Balancing Zone if you perform the right macro correction at the right time.