 I asked you to stick a parallelly shoulder. Hello, hello, Tim. Are you there? Can you hear me, mate? Good morning. That's a stupid idea. How do you make this look good? This is probably the worst absolute garbage. Welcome back to the School of Calisthenics for another YouTube lesson. We are, you're going to wonder why we're holding a cushion and a parallelly shoulder. We're talking handstands, we're talking about variability. Yeah, we want to bring a little bit of motor control science to the table with this one. And what we're going to try and show you is kind of part of the same thing. But the science part of this is that we're going to try and broaden out your handstand skills. So many times when we're learning to handstand, we think about going in a linear progression. It gets pretty serious and bogged down. We can have a little bit of play and also improve the variability of our handstand skills by mixing it up, different surfaces, different hand positions, that kind of thing. Welcome to a mock version of my front room. Now, you might be wondering, why have you got a pair of parallettes, a bit of a rug and a cushion out? And we're going to explain about training variability and we're going to use some examples to show you. And this video is a little bit twofold. There's some real benefits of using parallettes and we'll come to those in a second. But what we're also going to talk about is a variability within just practicing on different surfaces to enhance the robustness and adaptability of your handstand skills. If we only ever focus by practicing on the same floor, the same gym or in the same place, we get really good at that. But then when you're on holiday, you're at the beach, you're in a park, you want to do a handstand. You might find all of a sudden, what is a really nicely honed skill, all of a sudden falls apart because the hand difference or the hand placement or the surface is a little bit sort of uneven and all of a sudden you can't do a handstand. It's a slightly different stimulus, just the surface. So it's good not only to build up that so that you can do it in other places, but actually it's quite a good part of training with a skill-based thing like a handstand to actually just build up those different options that you've got. So you'll find that when you go back to your favourite surface, it's actually going to feel a lot better because it's got even more variability built into that skill process that it's been working on. Yeah, when we talk about this, we're balancing on our hands and using like our feet. If we were only ever really good at standing on one kind of surface, when we go out and we go and climb a mountain or something, we were going to want to go and operate in a different environment. The system just doesn't know how to regulate or how to control itself. So think of it in the same way, add some variability and the great thing about this that I like is it brings in an element of play. It's just kind of fun to see can you do a handstand with one hand on a cushion, which we're going to have a go at in a minute, but just bring some stuff in, play with it, be creative, use skills which you are confident with. There's no point trying to do a handstand on a Bosu ball if you can't yet do a handstand on the floor. So build up so it's kind of nice and progressive. That's the first point and we're going to show you those exercises in a second one in a minute. The second one is about parallettes. Now, if you're finding that you've got wrist pain or you've got a history of some wrist issues, you're lacking mobility, whatever it might be, having your hand in this position with the whole of your weight bearing down on it could potentially be a little bit sore around the wrist. The parallettes are a great little alternative for that because we get to create this position which is more neutral for the wrist and it starts then just creating more stable shape ultimately. We might want to work towards getting our wrist mobility improved so we can do it on the floor. We might only ever decide that parallettes are the thing for us and that's entirely down to you. The other thing is when you're gripping, the finger position has changed and now we're gripping and it's almost like a joystick, but we know from what we know about shoulder health, we know that grip strength is related to rotator cuff strength and so we get a nice bit of activation of your rotator cuff so there's stabilisers around the shoulder by gripping tight into the parallel, into the bar as well. So as you see, when Tim's going to go up into this, you're going to see that the hand is working now like a joystick. So rather than the fingers and the normal handstand being the brakes to stop you going over the top, it's actually going to work like an old-school joystick. Anyone old enough that used to play video games on joysticks. But you can see there just the little small adjustments are now coming more from the wrist rather than from the fingertips. And so you can play around any of your progressions in there, whether it's your frog stands, whether it's taking one knee off, two knee off or whether it's wanting to go into some tucks and some full handstands, you can work through all of the different exercises that you're going to do for your handstand just using the parallettes as a variation. It may be because you've got some of those wrist issues that Tim talked about, or it might be that you just want to have that opportunity to when you see some bars to be able to do it on or just literally mixing things up just to give the brain a little bit of a different stimulus and you'll find that like, when you mix those two things together with your normal handstands on the parallettes it gives you that variability to your practice in your training. There's also a little beautiful sort of sidekick on this one in that the higher you go, even though you can do the skill on parallettes close to the floor, when you get up off the floor, the visual, the vestibular challenge around that changes a little bit. All of a sudden fear creeps in just a little one again for building some robustness. So if you want to go higher level parallettes and start to do some work on there, it's a nice little brain training session. The second part of this little video I want to show you is just around using some different hand surfaces. Jacko's boy cushion. Tim, can you do a handstand with one hand on? I thought you were going to go one on the cushion, one on the panel. Well, that could be it. It's just giving you some ideas of some of the different things. What have you got at home that you could actually just challenge a different stimulus and go, okay, rather than, and it might be, okay, you haven't done a full handstand yet, but you want to work on your frog stand and just build up some of that robustness and variability to the practice. Nice, well done, Tim. That you're just working on the level that you're at at the time. We should try that now, see if we can do it. The level that you're at at the time might be a frog stand, or it might be a wall kick-up or whatever it may be that you're at and just going, okay, I'm going to have a little play around bringing in some excitement from the play stimulus and then go just challenging the same end result of a handstand, or a frog stand, or a kick-up, or whatever it is, but just with a little bit of a different stimulus. The good thing about the cushion there is if you're a bit worried about your frog stand. Yeah, use it to practice the head going down. The confidence. The final one is you might be at your mate's party and he's got the sheepskin rug out and he's like, oh, can you show me that trick that you can do and you're like, yeah, of course it will. And then you've never, when you've never tested it out before, and say if you have had a very linear training process where you only use the same bit of floor with the same markings on it, with everything visually the same, then also in terms of like feeling dexterity exactly the same and then you just shift that and try and do it somewhere else. You might find that the whole, your whole skill set just falls apart. So this is my favorite sheepskin rug. I don't know if it's officially sheepskin, but go in taking, just feeling how it's different, like I actually haven't even done one on this yet, but it does feel... You can see it's definitely different. When you grip, the floor is now going to move a little bit. So it's just a variable from the training stimulus. Play around with it, guys. The idea being that we're just altering and mixing up the stimulus a little bit, forcing the neural system to learn something slightly different, develop the control strategies. You've effectively then got more tools in your arsenal and then were able to actually control and nail your handstand by having more variability in your practice. So be creative, keep it safe, work with skills that you can control. Have some fun with it, like the hum drum and the ongoing sort of pressure of learning to handstand. There's going to cool points where you get a bit bogged down. Great opportunity to take a side step out, play with some other things with some more basic progressions. Not only does it give you a brain a break, but I'm pretty confident that by just mixing some of this stuff up, increasing the amount of variability, developing the robustness of the skill, will actually feed back into the practice that you're working on in a very controlled, stable environment. So go sideways, not always work about broadening out that width of that skill, as opposed to always thinking about a linear progression of one step, got to go all the way through. Variability and what's the word I'm looking for? Variety, some other V. I want to find a little point on it, is that when we start to do some of these things and Tim said like play with it and actually giving your brain a break, but it gives you like mind a little bit of a break of if I'm very good, the thing I can do and somebody will panic when they go I can't do anymore. It might be one day just not feeling right for whatever reason and it doesn't go great. When you take yourself and put yourself in a slightly different environment to have a bit of a play and test yourself, you know it's not your normal thing so if you fail you don't feel bad about it because you're like I'm just learning. And it just gives you some of that freedom to actually explore and as Tim said, you will get better at your handstand and you're also going to have a whole toolbox of places that you're going to be able to do it in. So there you go. Loads of stuff to play around with it. Your opportunities with this type of training are limited only by your creativity, bravery and common sense. Yes. And all those things are going to help you get a better handstand in the end. So if you want to get on your handstand journey you want more content like this, we have got a full training program designed to take you all the way from absolute beginner through to Handstand Hero in our virtual classroom and you can head over there and check it out now. We have been working on trying to do a handstand for six years and we have refined the process over that whole period and we've updated everything we have, this brand new handstand program that is the best that we've got, everything that we've learnt along the process from two ex rugby players that come with broken shoulders and dislocated shoulders and all these injuries and is 30-odd years old now going, how does it be close to 40? How do you not believe it, would you? Look at that face. How can we learn how to do a handstand and what is the most effective way to do that and that is what we have wrapped up in this brand new program. So please go check it out. A lot of you have been asking about stuff to do with handstands. You can buy it as a stand-alone program on its own or you can get it as part of one of our memberships which start from as little as 9.99 a month for the year to become a member of the School of Casenets Virtual Classroom. We'll see you there soon.