 This week on the movement strength and play podcast, we are talking all about handstand, all about strength and all about problems and basically problems that you might have if you're lacking handstand strength, depend and relating to a few different options or variations that people will be looking at with their handstand training. Ain't that right, Timbal? Well, this is a subject which is close to my heart and one that I have done a fair amount of research in over the years as we know you are the handstand strength guy. There you go, there's a new Instagram. You like guy like the things. I could have that one. I don't think you have enough characters though, will you? Handstand strength guy. Now you can have quite long names on Instagram. No, not on Twitter. Twitter is miserable. Miserably. Miserably, that's the right word. We're going to talk about this because we actually get like, if I post some handstand strength rated content, we often get quite a few questions that come in around how you kind of progress that level and that sort of thing. But I also want to frame this with I feel like handstand strength is being taken in a direction which is not amazing in some things. And I'm not going to point a finger crossfit because I love crossfit for what it has done. But let's get into it in a minute. But movement standards. I'm going to leave that there. Movement standards with handstand strength. That's kind of where I'm going to go. So if you want to hear that point, that is going to be the soapbox. But before that, we can talk a little bit about progressive overload towards it. Yeah, I like to tease it. Yeah. What do you say? Movement standards. I like that as a firm. Well, let's say, we properly mused them. I was like, movement standards. How can I start using that phrase more often? But if you do like a little bit of handstand strength, progressive work, it doesn't necessarily need to be like bossing out full handstand push ups of parallax with weight based on it. Can just be some quite progressive and challenging variations of some really fun hand balancing exercises like frog stand and some other stuff in that kind of vein. So if you want to kind of push things on in that direction, then we have got our strength and play packages, Jaco available online. Yeah, exactly. And we've got a with our strength and play training programs. We've got these two elements to it. And the strength and play is full tutorials. And then there is a strength play in conditioning work. So it's not there's a little bit around the obviously different handstand variations, but there's a whole load of other stuff. It's incorporating all full body in that. And then the conditioning ones are whole actual training sessions and conditioning workouts to follow along. So you don't have to think about what you're doing is all of that and also out for you. And those two are coming together as a special bundle offer in October to help you enjoy your training with movement, strength and play. And the details for that are in the show notes. So if you click through there, you'll get to see that special strength play in conditioning bundle offer for you to enjoy inside the virtual classroom. If you already a member with your standard or VIP memberships, that's already part of your membership, baby. So you don't need to buy that extra. You get that already. This program is for if you're somebody who's like just kind of bored of doing normal pull ups or I'm kind of been working with this muscle up for ages and it's just not going anywhere. I need to freshen things up. That is exactly the reason we designed this program. It's just literally the strength play and strength and play tutorials like a library and there's tons of stuff in there just to go. I never even thought about doing that. I was going to go and freshen up. I'm going to do some this kind of pull up variation for a while. And honestly, this one of the best things you'll do if you're training is you're still getting strong, but you're challenging yourself. You're having some fun. It brings back if you've been in Calisthenics for a while, but you and your stagnator because you're chasing harder goals like Hans and push up. Some of this stuff would just kind of really give you that enjoyment back that you had in the early stages where you get to do something you've not done before, but it's much more achievable. So definitely I feel out of all our programs, people have not mined this one enough. I think there's a ton of value in there for people. So go and check it out. I did a whole session in my garden yesterday, literally of these at a great time. Yeah, I got strong and got strong. Right, sit back and enjoy. I hope you'll enjoy it. A little bit of a chat around getting handstand strong. Roll that jingle. Listen, players. You're listening to the movement, strength and play podcast by the School of Calisthenics. Here are your hosts, Tim and Jaco. Okay, so whatever your handstand sort of goal is, whether you're trying to do a frog to handstand, whether you're trying to just do a normal kick up handstand, whether you're trying to do handstand walking, whether you're trying to do handstand push ups. They all are going to require a certain level of strength and something we've talked about many times before is like the more strength you have, the easier you're able to do something like a handstand that has a cognitive demand. So if your body or brain is sensing strength and stability, it can then focus on the skill element of the handstand practice that you're doing. Whereas if you're struggling in your blood, you're at your max strength, like things get a bit funky and things get a bit difficult. And you were giving others a lot of cognitive demand as well as the strength demand makes these different things, makes these different variations with your hands. We've both had a very different experience of building hands on strength. Tim has like adductor water, whereas I'm like, what's the opposite of adductor water? Which with the rock round the legs when they're trying to see if they're going to float or not or die. That's what you know, and these are witches in the water with rocks on, see if they live. You're like one of them. You're not a witch, but that's the only thing I could think of that was properly sinking rather than just going stone. I felt like he needed some context or some texture rather than just going eat like a rock. Yeah, no, it's good. That's it. Yeah, so people you're going to fall into one of those two camps or somewhere in the middle. It's either going to be something that comes well, or it's probably for most people it's going to come hard on, right? We just can go through a couple of reasons why those things might be the case. Do you want to kick off with just from your perspective, what you've learned from your handstand push-up work and where you see the way you see the most, what's the thing that people are lacking potentially? And then I've explored plenty of this of trying to get better and still a work in progress. But I've got, you know, by failing many times you get to understand certainly things that don't work and then start to understand what the sort of limitations are for people. Yeah, definitely right. So there's two things that we can kick off on this one. The first one is I'm going to say that, and this is kind of like anecdotal, probably not going to make it into a meta-analysis on PubMed of research. Some people will find that they are naturally better at pulling than pushing movements and some vice versa. I get much better progression in my push movements and I do my pull. Now we could throw in some mix that that is a morphological type. We are built a certain way, which means that you've got more back musculature or you've got better strength in certain patterns. My tendency though is to lean towards thinking that it's probably more to do with training history, which is my second point where typically what have you done in the past which has created this potential ease at which you might then see progression now. Yeah, and the answer is going to be here potentially. You're put together, everyone's skeleton is not identical, you're put together a certain way and that actually lends me towards being better at pushing or pulling. And then therefore actually when I look at my training history I did a lot more pulling than pushing or whatever that may be. They are probably going to be linked together somewhat in terms of that. Just because we do stuff we like, don't we? We do stuff we like and we like stuff we're good at. Yeah, we do the good stuff that we're good at. So somebody who's really good at pulling, when they go into weight training, we'll probably have just gone, you know, I'm going to pull two, three times a week. I'm not that good at bench or presses, so I'm actually not going to do that as much. But that's standard, like we might not know it, but those incremental kind of doses of exposure to a stimulus will add up significantly if you've done three, four, five years of weight training where you're just biased towards specific movements. So if I take myself as a case study, I did a lot of pressing based work when I first started training, a lot of bench, a lot of tricep work. And because of my shoulder history, I have done a lot of shoulder work. And when I started weight training, I built my shoulders up just generally, and then I started having some more problems with them, started back at the bottom again, wanted to get back to it. So I've just biased training over years, over the years, towards shoulder pressing because I wanted to get back to a place where I had confidence of the back of having surgeries. So when I came through to my handstand work, well, I was just arriving with a massive amount of training history and vertical pressing patterns and tricep based work because obviously like vertical or horizontal pressing, the tricep is going to be working as a synergist with the pecs and deltoids and whatever. So I just arrived at the table, kind of ready to press. Now, I struggle with pulling movements. I'm not great at them. Like I can do a couple of decent muscle ups and stuff, but my front lever progression has not been anywhere near as quick as what I would have got from a planche progression, for example. So I think that's a real kind of just something for you to reflect on. If you're going to do a really bad at pushing based movements, I would just question and before we start blaming it on our physiology, which could be a play. I agree with you on that. But how much work have you done in the past, which might now mean that you are more inclined to be better at one than the other. And let's take an example, people with long femurs aren't going to be great squatters. They're not going to do a lot of it because it's just kind of awkward. It doesn't work that well. So we might find that that is an example of something that we might have a similar kind of thing for the upper body. So yeah, I think that's just important to recognize. So if you're coming into wanting to do handstand strength work to your point before, Jackie, you don't have to be that strong to do a kick handstand. But if you want to go and do a handstand pushup, now you're talking about a really sort of building some real depth in strength and stability combined. You have to be able to link that whole chain together, keep it stable and be able to produce force. There's a massive difference of doing a handstand pushup versus doing a barbell press, for example, or a dumbbell press. You go to shift more weight relatively for a lot of people in a handstand and a barbell press or a dumbbell and shoulder press. And then if you took your body weight, we did a little test a while ago. Does it work out if I can do a handstand pushup and I can press my body weight overhead? It's not exactly one for one, but it's just a slightly different skill. And the complexity at play is far greater in the handstand pushup because it's far less stable. I know that I'm much more stable when I'm on feet on the ground and then with my hands. So when you go into this kind of handstand pushup-based progression, you go, I want to go and get strong, you need to kind of recognize what training history if you've gotten vertical pressing patterns. If you haven't really got a good depth in pike pushups, if we're talking strictly calisthenics and you aren't kind of like moving to places where you are doing them with your feet elevated, hands elevated through full range of motion, you just need to go and build a boatload of strength in those patterns because your handstand pushup is never going to be good when you're adding the complexity as you mentioned before on the stability unless you've got a massive, massively big base of strength to play with. And I think that just touching on a couple of those bits that you said around training history, I think I mentioned in the previous podcast about being terrible at bench press when I first started training. So pressing has never been, if I look back, never been something that I was then particularly great at. And I think that the working towards like your frog to handstand or your handstand pushups where you're not just kicking into that straight arm and shoulder flexion position overhead, we actually have to push into it. Like expose for me of everything that we've tried to do like human flags and all sorts of muscle, all sorts of nothing exposes your shoulder and sort of lack of control, stability of your scapula, your shoulder blade like doing a handstand pushup or pressing out of a frog stander like I've not, I personally don't, I've not done an exercise that doesn't expose me on that. And if we go to like previous training history, like look at your injuries that people may have had as well and how well like for me it comes down to where I had issues around my shoulders playing rugby where I knew there was a problem but it wouldn't stop in me from like training and doing that sort of job. If we didn't barbell pressing overhead, I could always be like compensating, like there'd be some sort of like movement compensation always going through and then when I broke my scapula in two places, broke the chromium in the corgis process, I'd rehab to get to like play again but like my movement of the shoulder was like poor, strength was poor but I didn't have to be like good at pressing overhead to get back to doing the sport that I love doing and so I don't think I didn't, almost, I didn't rehab my shoulder well enough to the point of being able to do some of the things we're trying to do now, it just rehabbed it to a point where it could play rugby. That's interesting because you know it's on shoulders for a second but if you missed that dynamic stability phase and you kind of got comfortable with what you got and then when you came to try and add some strength you're actually trying to build a house on pretty like shaky foundations. And that's what it feels like when you try it, so overhead, like fine, like actually in that end overhead position like and that's where you left that bottom arm is in the flag, like it's fine there. It's as I start to come down the scapulas they're actually starting to move, either coming down or when you're going back out and they start to move, it's like uh oh, it just does not like it. And I think one thing that we've talked about for plenty of people before in the past to reiterate now again is like videoing yourself when you're doing these things so you can match up, how does it feel in your body to what you actually see? And when I, you know, if I video that stuff and trying to get better at making these things like evening these things out but it's clear for me to see when I look at it visually like why there's still a problem on that right-hand side that still goes back for all those years to sort of injury and trying to, without videoing and seeing yourself it's difficult for you to know what's going on because you just can't see, you can't see your scapula moving because you're going upside down and handstand as well. Let me move this to a place where we try and give you some takeaways and then we're going to talk a little bit about movement standards. So if you're kind of setting up, okay, yeah, I'm listening, you've got my attention with the title for the podcast, I want to do some handstand push-ups. Okay, so the first port of call for me is that you get your handstand nailed down. So you're going to need to have this real stable, confident handstand where you can get up into a position reliably because that's your start and finish point. Until you can do that, and you've got a really stable position, you're going to find it difficult to move in and out of that start, finish position. As you lower down into a handstand, it actually gets easier because if you're strong enough when you go into the lowering phase of a handstand push-up, you're kind of getting close to the ground, you're moving into a bit of a shoulder-stand position, your shoulders are tucked in, you can kind of sit in some bigger musculature and you've got a shorter lever effectively if you can find a balance which is just off vertical. You're going to rock onto the angle, you're going to lower yourself down, you're sitting in that bottom position. Now the hardest bit is getting out from there. So here's a couple of strength tips for you. And let's kind of just as to frame this so people are going like, I've seen you do tiger bend push-up or that worm to handstand thing which is the greatest movement in calisthenics, by the way. Then I want to do all of that. All of those start in that bottom position. So if there's going to be a tiger bend push-up where I'm standing into the bottom of a handstand push-up but now I've got a bent spine which I'm going to have to correct or the worm push-up, you rock up into that deep position. So we've got to get good here. Now, if you're going through pipe push-up progressions, as I said, work from the floor, start getting your feet up on a box or something so you're in a nice L position and then start working through into hands elevated. So you want your hands on parallettes, kettlebells, something so you can actually then go and play through full range of motion. If we only ever do work in our handstand push-ups from our head position, so hands on the floor then head go can go as low as it can do which is basically to the floor. We're missing out on a ton of range of motion which I'm going to need where basically my hands are right next to my shoulders. So we've got to get those hands elevated so you can work through that extra range. When you're lowering through e-centric, you've got to nail that e-centric and this is where I think there's one of them huge benefits for the shoulder, this kind of what we call closed kettle chain work. We don't e-centric control the barbell very well when it's heavy, they throw it up and then they let it go. So we're not controlling that e-centric phase and what that means is we don't get the development of the scapula control as it comes back into that retraction position because we just fall. So all of a sudden we're not decelerating particularly well. If you go try and go into a handstand push-up and you can't decelerate well to get that bottom position, you're going to hit the ground and you're going to lose the control through the rest of the body. So as you lower down into that position work on some e-centric focus, four or five seconds and then hit your pause at the bottom. You're going to want to be able to have the confidence to move out of a dead position. So you lower down slowly when you hit that bottom position stop hold it for two seconds and then try and drive yourself back out. That's kind of like high-end sort of strength development for this kind of work but to Jaco's point before when you drop in if you've got the confidence to stop and then go if you find yourself slightly off balance at certain points during the movement you've got the strength to stop re-correct yourself and then start pushing again. I do that all the time. I'll be pushing out going on losing balance stop do the correction for the stability and then finish the rep. Once you can do those when a pipe push-up position and you can probably build some of these along concurrently but then go up against the wall do the same thing. Feet up against the wall hands elevated do the same thing just get reps in the bank so that when you come to do remember talking Jaco to Sam Holden about the plunge say you can do like five to eight really good hands down push-ups against the wall with the feet going in the hands going elevated so head to the ground you might have enough strength to do one freestanding if you can control the instability. When you take the wall away the extra strength demand that's required to stabilize in free space is massive. So if you think eight reps means one it shows you how it shows you how strong you're going to have to be if you want to put a set of five together. That was a download. Yeah and I think that we I definitely in the past underestimated that massively you sort of you do six against the wall and you think well I could probably do six against the wall I could probably do three or four without the wall and you disrespect how much that wall is helping you even though even though you might be only just like brushing it the fact that you have another point of contact with a stable surface connected to the earth just adds like closes off that it's it closes off that kinetic chain you've got then contact on the floor with the hands and then solve the chain of your feet and it just adds like the body just loves that in terms of like that that stability whereas the opposite comes in when you take that into that free space so yeah not denying respect that but then also like we've got to then do the work basically in terms of the strength it's one of those it's one of those things we've got to and that's where that's probably where I need to spend a bit more time. That was one thing I was going to say you know we're talking the last in the last podcast we're talking about like training home I'm going to give myself one I'm going to make a commitment here or the thing my little thing that I'm going to work on or have a thought of working towards during the winter months when I haven't got so much space and stuff at home is the worm I'm going to work on the worm because I basically need to do a load of like pike push-up stuff to build up that strength and I just have a little I'll have a little bit of fun with that rather than just doing trying to do like hard handstand push-ups and I'll find that a bit more fun that'll be a I'll see how I'll walk back and see how I get on. It's easier than it looks it's much easier than the tiger bend and it's still very hard though because I haven't tried it. It feels wicked like that is my favorite thing it is so much fun. Can I jump on my soapbox for a second? Movement standards in handstand push-ups like I'm going to do this simply picture somebody doing a handstand push-up on parallax with a back all bent out of shape we can we'll take keeping out of it for now but you know there's that thing we got proper banana back in like a deep handstand push-up and someone's grinding out a repetition and let's say that person weighs if it's a female could be 50 kilos up with something like if you take like some athletic female if it's a guy like yeah could be a lot more than that would we be happy with that on a barbell standing on our feet no no one's going to suggest we press in that pattern and is it different well you could probably buy a mechanist or buy a mechanist probably would probably have a good sort of chat of that but I think there's something really kind of we need to delve into it if we could flip somebody upside down we're stacking big vertebrae on top of smaller ones when we're standing on our feet we're actually sort of more aligned as humans that's how we're designed to move so when you flip things upside down we've got this kind of slightly different forces going through the spine what we're doing with the shoulder in that shape is we're actually trying to rely on more pec rather than shoulder pure shoulder kind of pressing strength because we bring the hands down a little bit into kind of more like a let's say a vertical sorry incline push-up type position we keep the feet against the wall we have to arch the back so there's a whole load of stuff that's going on within this and then as we start to push out the back and the spine can start to move and I want to shout I created this Kelly Starrett for this one I saw him do a good a good post yesterday around spine organization and he's like we could be pretty good in like a fixed flex position or we could be pretty good in neutral we can even be reasonably good in extension what we don't like or what the body doesn't like is that when we're shifting between the two of them on the load and I don't know how many people get back injuries from handstand push-ups but it just for me doesn't look great and when movement is good it looks effortless so my encouragement of this without kind of like complaining too much about how people move is just there's some massive massive advantages of learning to do handstand push-ups strict with the shoulder connected through the through the chain to the pelvis and not allowing that back to arch through in terms of how that strength is going to transition into functional performance if we remove the conversation of like you've got to do a certain number of handstand push-ups in a certain amount of time under x amount of fatigue I'm all for preparing the shoulder for that environment if that's what the task and job is to do I'm not anti that what I want to see though is our ability to be able to do it strict and then choose to go and move like that if that's the only way that you can move in a handstand push-up I'm going to say that that's not a great foundation for long-term strength and injury prevention and ultimately we're like we don't want you to get injured we don't want to be in pain and if we're compensating massively through the spine it might be that you injure the spine or actually it might be the one of the most the most likely thing you're going to injure during some handstand work when you're making massive compensations is the shoulder and so it's one thing just to sort of finish off for me is to like any of the work that you're going through during this handstand work whether it's like basic pike push-up principles or building things up it always needs to be going through pain-free like if you're feeling pinching and pain around the shoulder and you're doing it you're not building you're not moving effectively you're not going to be building effective strength and pain will actually pain inhibition is something like the pain will actually like stop you from like producing force so you're not going to be generating force and producing or creating adaptations for changes in your strength so that's just a really key one for me and that is that comes from places I've made that mistake far too many times in the past myself so I feel like it's fair enough for me to say that because I've made that mistake myself good I hope there's some useful stuff in there handstand push-up is the road or the other gateway to lots of other handstand fun you can have so but it does take some time to develop and if you've not I just count in summary if you've not done a lot of vertical pressing work it's going to take some time and that's not a four-week strength block and then go I wonder why I can't do a handstand push-up you might need to work on that for a year consistently I'm going to spend more winter working on my work yeah so yeah take some of that away any questions you can always find them through to us the winter is a great block to do a little bit of this kind of basic strength work in preparation for when the grass dries and then you can get outside and you can start practicing your handstand and yeah check out the strength and play progressions or the tutorials that we've got in our online programs if you want to go and have a little bit of something to spice things up if you look into fresh in your training program you want some new ideas and just some fun stuff to play with during these winter months there's a lot of things in there which will bring a smile to your face yeah and there's a special offer for the month of October on that bundle putting into those two programs together so check out the link in the show notes for that my last point Jack and I enjoying these little short episodes and we're getting some good feedback that people like them because it's about the right length for a dog walk or something like that if you've got some subjects that you would like us to cover on a podcast short email them to us tim at schoolofcalsaints.com or david at schoolofcalsaints.com let us know give us just a give me a real short one you do it now like so you listen to your dog just picked up a dog poo you can go right I'm going to message your boys I want you to do a short podcast on X and we'll throw them in we like we like to we want to try to let's bring that q&a vibe back that we used to enjoy so much yeah yeah that's how the podcast was was initiated go back to listen to the early episodes you can just about here is over the clinking coffee cups of a coffee nearer that we once recorded one in we've come a long way right they're not you also specialty coffee shops available become slobs in so we wouldn't know we'd never go to nearer enough um sorry everyone who works at nearer guys until next time keep exploring your physical potential with movement strength and play class dismissed