 Welcome back to School of Calesthenics. This one is all about transitioning from frog stand to handstand. In our strength handstand guide, we look at this frog stand and pressing out into the handstand. It's one of the ways that we love most to get into a handstand. It helps you build great pushing strength. But we've got a lot of people struggling with the transition out of that frog stand taking both legs off and rotating up. So there's a whole host of reasons why that might be the case. We're going to go through what not to do and show you some pointers about what we're trying to achieve. And then we've got our one best exercise to help you nail that transition for the first time and redefine your impossible. So before we show you the one best exercise for transitioning from frog stand to handstand, we want to tell you why it's a difficult thing to do and why it's important to put a progressive movement in place which is going to help you to link these two positions. The first reason is in that frog stand you're in a pretty, what we call, dead position. You haven't got any momentum. It's very different as a movement compared to coming down from a handstand push-up and pressing straight back out. We've got this opportunity to capitalise on a bit of an elastic response in the body. In that frog stand, you're effectively a dead weight and you've got to get moving. If you think about maximal strength training, that's a really key part of it. You've got to get from nothing to something. So yes, it requires some strength and we need a way to be able to progressively load that whilst learning the movement pattern of rotating the hips up on top of the shoulders. So Tim sets himself up in that frog stand. He gets comfortable at the bottom. Just take note first of where his hip is because it's going to be one of the key points. Where his hip is in relation to his shoulder. It's much further behind, okay? So when the first thing he's got to be able to do is part of this position, he's going to take both legs off and not sink at the shoulder at all. As he rotates then the hip over the top to stack it on top of the shoulder, he's then straightening that arm as he presses out and ending in that full overhead position or full flexion of the shoulder position. That is the end of your transition. So there are a few things that can go wrong with this frog stand transition and they're related to strength and also related to that hip position and that alignment comparing that hip in relation to the shoulder and that stacking position. So first off, we're just going to look at what happens when Tim, when he takes both legs off, he should stay nice and strong in this position before he rotates up. So that is a strength thing. Front of the shoulder, tricep, can he hold and maintain that sort of isometric position? What often happens for a lot of people when they're starting out, from a strength point of view, they take both legs off and then they crumple down at the shoulder and just start bending, bending, bending. So what he's got to do is build up enough isometric strength through some of the regressions we show. So he takes both legs off and then he stays at that shoulder angle rather than dropping any further. So he needs to build isometric strength when he takes those legs off but the hip just drops back down so he's never actually starting that rotation process. He's got to push his hips up but he's also got to pull the shoulder through. So you start and then take that hip from being behind where his pivot point is on the floor, his base of support. So he's going to take the knees off and rotate and push them up and start to stack them on top of the shoulder as well as that shoulder angle opening up. So let's have a look at those two things happening again. The shoulder pressing up and opening into the angle as well as the hip coming off and rotating up and stacking then that hip directly on top of the shoulders. In that position, you're balancing, you're not fighting against gravity, pulling down because you've got a nice straight stacked aligned position. So what we're going to do now is we're going to look at how we can use the resistance band to help and support us in this position in terms of strength but then also how we can set it up on the angle to encourage us with this rotation position that we need from the hips. So we've got a nice little exercise for you to play around with guys and this is really going to help you to learn that movement pattern. So teach your brain how to move into the shape you need to. But it's also because we're going to use the band, going to give you an a progressive approach where we can slowly start to lower the amount of assistance that we get down which is going to make this movement more difficult for you but ultimately move you towards being able to do it freestanding by itself. So a couple of things we need to talk about some mechanics to start off with. Jaco's just going to show us a frog stand. He's going to put his hands directly below the bar. Just talk about where this band needs to go into the line of pull. The movement we're trying to follow is this line of the hip. So when Jaco rotates and lifts over we're looking for this forward movement and upwards. So if we need to make sure the hands are in the right place so we can put the band around his hip and it follows that same line. If his hands are too far forwards what's going to happen is the band is going to be somewhere in this direction and you're then trying to rotate forwards but the band is pulling you backwards. So just have a think about how you're going to set that up. So if hands go directly underneath if not a little bit further behind the bar that's going to put you in the right position. So if the band comes down and loops around the hips this is just going to take a little bit of weight off that lower body as you start to rotate into the position. So Jaco now goes frog stand. You can see he's just chosen to go a little bit further behind which is great. Drops into his position and now what the band is that line of direction is he starts to push and do those things that we just talked about. He just helps him to pull the hips into a good position and create that straight arm strength. So the band offering two levels of support there one with the rotation, one with it pulling upwards decreasing the amount of strength it needs from the shoulder to actually push that hip into that seated position. Once he's got into that shape he can actually rep those a little bit. So it's a great exercise to do with some volume and we're also going to try to lower down so we get the eccentric phase as well. So he pops up and then he can actually then try to control it. The band again taking a little bit of weight off as he lowers himself back down stick five of those together and these guys are going to know about it. Now some of you might be at a point where you're finding it difficult to get both legs off and that's not we make it look easy I think we'll have to practice well hopefully it looks easy but it's actually really difficult when you take those legs off you've got a lot of weight you've got to manage and we get a lot of questions from people just struggling to take one leg off because even that's a big jump when this little trusty exercise can come in handy again. So Jaco's got the band on already same sets up hands in line or just behind the line of the bar and when he drops into the position here for his frog stand the band is just going to help him do the same thing but all we're looking at doing this time is just taking the one leg off the band gives him some support. Two of the cues that we use all the time in this exercise when we coach it is you've got to keep pushing the floor down hard that's going to help with the transition that we're looking to do anyway into that full handstand position but the other thing is you've got to keep the hips high so many times people take a leg off and the hips drop but with the encouragement of the band that's giving your brain an opportunity to learn where the hips need to be and it also takes a little bit of load off meaning it's easier to keep that hip high and stacked up over the elbow and wrist. So we have answered one of life's huge questions how do you transition out of that frog into handstand and yeah it might not be your it might not be the biggest question that everyone is on everyone's list but if you've been struggling with this just like we were and it feeling impossible when we're starting out we had no chance of doing this whatsoever but building up progressively and particularly using that band is a massive help for you learning that movement pattern of the rotation but also most importantly building some of that strength up in the front of the shoulders and it would definitely help you to redefine your impossible. And that's a key take over for us guys you've got to build up that time on the tension use the band progressively work at a level where five to 10 seconds really is the limit of what you can do pushing down hard all the time you can't just get a big blue band and hang out there for 30 seconds going right there we're gonna be on to the next level it has to be difficult if the brain is gonna make an adaptation you're gonna build the strength that you need to go back into that freestanding practice and there is nothing wrong you feel like you're getting close learn that movement pattern of doing it freestanding try a couple of reps don't spend half an hour on it tell your brain what you try to do and then go back to the band and put some reps in the locker yeah now I'm pretty biased I said to Tim after we filmed I was like that's a good video now if you need some help or you actually know someone that can't transition up frog stand in there banging on about all the time cause I think it's impossible send them this video and let's try and help some people redefine their impossible see you next time faster Smith