Handstands: For Athletic Prowess And Injury Prevention

Handstands are something that many of us can remember doing – or trying to do – at school. But in later life even those of us who could hold a few minutes upside down against a wall with the greatest of ease find that we’ve lost the knack.

And handstands are hard to progress with. In fact, that’s a problem common to all bodyweight training really. If you don’t have some progressions laid out, you get past the first post and it can be hard to see how to get from where you are to where you want to be. 

I want to talk about two ways you can use handstands to get better performance.  If you’re already pretty strong and healthy, you can use handstand work to improve your shoulder health and get a better overhead or even bench press. If you’re just starting out on your fitness journey or you prefer bodyweight exercises, handstand pushups are the bodyweight overhead press and require no more equipment than a wall. The loading pattern on the rest of your body is different, but for your upper back and shoulders, handstand pushups are equivalent to pressing your bodyweight overhead; not record-breaking by any means, but a solid achievement. Throughout this article I’ll use ‘handstand’ to mean any upside down pushing move, referring to both a true handstand and a headstand (until the difference matters, when I’ll clarify the issue.)

Experienced Athletes and the Handstand

If you’re already strong or an experienced lifter, this section is for you. If not, skip ahead to Bodyweight and Beginners. 

For people who want to get big and strong, bodyweight exercises can seem wimpy and futile. After you can do 20 pushups, for instance, why carry on? Why do more? Isn’t the bench press a better exercise for the chest and arms, allowing you to progressively add load and increase strength incrementally? Well, yes and no. Some bodyweight exercises are futile and wimpy, like crunches. Others, like pullups, are the tools of champions – including Arnold Shwarzenegger in his heyday, who used them regularly. Handstands aren’t necessarily different: they’re harder to add load to than dips or pullups, and a handstand belt doesn’t seem like such a good idea to me, but they’re hard enough that for most people, a couple of sets of handstand pushaps doesn’t bring on the thought: ‘I must find a way to make this harder!’

Bodyweight training can augment weight training very well. For instance, the deadlift certainly affects the legs and arms – in fact it’s hard to think of a lift that affects more of your body. But it’s primarily a hip hinge exercise: a core exercise, promoting growth and strength in the ‘outer core’ of glutes, lats, traps and hamstrings and hip flexors as well as requiring a serious stabilizing contraction in the ‘inner core’ of the pelvic floor, abdominal and low back muscles and diaphragm. Don’t you think your deadlift would be better if you could do front and back levers, hanging from a bar overhead by just your hands with your body level with the floor? 

In the same way, the headstand/handstand can really improve your pressing with barbells or dumbbells. It does that by loading the shoulders but not the back (so much), allowing some safe deterioration of strict overhead pressing form to take place without danger to the spine, and by requiring a more conscious contraction of the core. Additionally, most people’s handstand work involves some static hold work, and static holds build connective tissue, small muscles like the serratus muscles and rotator cuffs – you know, those things that paid for your physio’s Bentley – and increases the strength of tendons. Tendons have less blood flow than muscles so they grow less quickly, meaning that your muscles can outstrip the strength of the tendons that hold the whole affair together. That’s a recipe for injury, but static holds can help avert it and even help cure injuries you did get that way. Throw some serious bodyweight training in after your main lifts and see the progress you make towards a stronger, injury-free future.

Beginners and Bodyweight

if you’re just starting out getting fit, bodyweight movements can be more forgiving than weightlifting ones. Oftentimes, a beginner will be best served by loading only very heavy movements like the squat and deadlift. Upper body work especially is often less punishing to the beginner’s shocked nervous system and can be more intuitive while allowing him to shift some weight – his own! That means using pushups instead of benches, pullups and dips instead of the lat pulldown machine and it can mean throwing some handstand work in as raw strength training. Using handstands to develop stronger shoulders will aid you when you transfer to the heavy weights as you get stronger. 

And if you don’t want to transfer to the heavy weights, take heart:  Down the line you could be doing sets of handstand pushups on the still rings. That’s an athletic feat most people – including plenty of strong people – couldn’t approach. You can get seriously strong with bodyweight exercises and the handstand will see you along your journey from calisthenics to gymnastic exercises, staying relevant and challenging the whole way.

How To Do The Handstand

I’ll list four progressions here, beginning with a really easy one and going on to a genuinely challenging exercise by way of some neat training hacks.

I’d always recommend starting on the floor. You can do handstand work on a bar, parallel bars, parallettes, rings, suspension straps – but the floor is the safest and easiest place to start.

1: Getting up there

For many this is the first and last stumbling block. Start in a crouch, like a sprinter on the starting blocks, facing a wall, with your hands a foot or so away from it, and then lean forward from the hips slightly. Kick off the ground with both legs, allowing the back foot to come up first while the front foot finishes kicking you off the ground. Your feet will probably hit the wall harder than you mean them to, but don’t panic, just be ready for the impact.

When you’re upside down, it’s time to check your form. As much as possible, don’t bend at hips or waist.  Tense your whole waist area and your glutes. Push your shoulders towards the floor, don’t let them collapse up into you, and keep your head neutral: don’t look at the floor, look away from the wall that’s holding you up.

Practice getting up into the handstand position and practice spending some time there, like a slow count of ten two or three times. Work it into your training sessions as a secondary move until you feel comfortable getting up there.

2: Wall Walking

Walking on your hands is quite an advanced skill. But walking sideways along a wall on your hands can allow you to get some of the same benefits as walking on your hands without the balance requirements. This is great for building strength in the shoulder girdle that will pay off in your bench or overhead press.

Set yourself a distance, and then halve it. Seriously, this is a lot harder than you think.  Make sure there’s no detritus or objects that will knock you over or twist your wrists.  Get into the handstand position and walk your right hand sideways about the width of a hand.  Then catch it up with your left hand.  Tense your waist and glutes and resist the urge to sway to help yourself along: it will make you fall over.  After a few steps, reverse your direction.  Try to build up to doing this for distance – say, five feet – with decent form. 

As you walk, for a little part of each step your weight is on only one leg. As you do the wall walk, for a little part of each step your weight is on only one hand, meaning you’re giving yourself a big strength challenge.  It’s not a static hold any more, but it’s far from a headstand pushup!

3: Supramaximal hold

A supramaximal hold is one of several strategies used by competitive weights athletes like powerlifters to break through plateaux.  When they can’t add any more to, say, their bench, by simply putting more weight on the bar, they’ll use this ‘hack’ to trigger an increase in strength.  It’s hard on the nervous system so don’t try to do it for a long time or frequently!

Get into the handstand position and lower yourself until your arms are very slightly bent.  Now hold that position for a count.  Try five seconds to start off with! 

Even this tiny change in the position of the load can have big effects on how heavy it feels.  You’re going to change the whole shape of your upper back as you bend the arms to lower yourself and the muscles can’t just rely on the skeleton any more: they have to contract to hold you up.  You can expect to see a jump in strength when you begin doing these.

4: Headstand pushup

OK, I said I’d explain it when you needed to know it and here it is.  A headstand pushup is where your head touches the floor.  A handstand pushup is where your head comes through the bars or rings that are supporting you and your hands stop on your shoulders.  Obviously, the headstand pushup is easier, but it’s still a very hard movement for most.

Get into the handstand position and slowly lower yourself until your arms are slightly bent, then return to the straight arm position.  Keep your elbows in front of you – don’t have them out to the side, it’s bad for your shoulders.  Gradually increase the depth: my favourite way to do that is to lower myself onto slightly lower objects until my head touches them.  Paperback books are a good choice, letting you gradually add depth.  Don’t think about pushing up with your arms – find the power in your upper back to drive the floor away.  Once you can reliably do full depth ones for reps – say, five or six in a set and two or three sets – start thinking about moving on to real handstand pushups, on bars or parallettes.