 Welcome back to another school of calisthenics Q&A with Tim and Jacko. The playground sessions. The playground sessions. I forget that we've retired. I'm not on brand anymore, which is... I'm not on brand naws, aren't I? You've disappointed with yourself aren't you? I'm going to go and chastise myself over my lack of brand awareness later. When today we are looking at handstand help. Yes, we are. A few handstand questions flooding in. I mean, it's funny seeing as it's all building towards a handstand world record, 23rd of June in Nottingham world record attempt for the most number of people doing a handstand at one time, current record £399. We are looking to blow that out of the park. Considerably. Considerably, but it's going to be a whole day event. It's not just a 15-second handstand, then you go home. We're going to try and put some of this stuff on as well. It should be a good day. Yeah. We've got capacity of 10,000 people I've been told at the venue. I'm expecting that to sell out. But if you haven't signed up, you can find out. We'll put the link in the notes. You can go to the website on schoolofcarnasens.com, forward slash handstand challenge. Yeah, hashtag handstand challenge. I think it actually uses the little hashtag thing. We'll put it in there. We'll put it in there. We'll get signed up guys. We actually really need the help. I know it would be a great day out, so we'd love it if you could help us. So. And learning handstand is cool. And we know that it's by far the most popular thing that we get. Questions about and people get involved in and want to try. Not the most popular thing that we have to get asked. I shall ask you the most popular question that we get to set this up. The most popular calisthenics thing. Yeah. So this question we literally get on a daily basis. Not once, multiple times. You ready? Across different platforms. Across different platforms. The most common question we get asked. Asked. Yeah. Can I guess it? You might. Do you think I'll guess it? No. You might miss it. You ready for question, Dave? Okay. Question master asks me the first question. Hi. That's it. I do love those ones. So I sometimes look at it and go, what do you want me to do with that? I like it. It's friendly. I really like the friendly outreach. I'm impressed that that isn't a question I thought would get read out on the podcast. No. But it's actually made it there. Neither did the 10 people that asked it. I don't know what were their names. Too many to mention. But yeah, it's not. We appreciate that you reach out and we then have to ask a question back. So then find out what the question is. And sometimes we get a reply and sometimes we don't. I often preempt that it's their first interaction and they don't really know what's going on. So I'll go, oh, have you got to start with our free beginners guy? Because a lot of the time people want to get started with the free beginners guy. So I'm like trying to second guess them. But I mean, I like it more when they come back and then just write no. You know, I can't help you now. I'm fine. Thanks. Yeah. I think I've had one where someone's done that. I've gone, hi, I've gone. Hi, how can we help you? Now I'm fine. The other one I've had recently is a couple of people emailing questions and go, how can I increase my height from training? Yeah, there's quite a lot about height. There's been loads. And but we're not really equipped to get to help with that. We'd both be probably more than 510 if we could improve height. Definitely no taller as a result of doing that. I mean, if you knew the secret to get taller, would you make yourself taller? That's a good question. Would you make yourself taller? I'd like to be 6'4'. Would you? I don't know if I would actually. But I would want the equivalent increase in muscle mass. I don't want one way to be involved. 62 kilos, 6'4'. I'd be a sight to see, wouldn't I? If you don't know the 62 kilo, Joe, go back to the last Q&A that we recorded. I'll go back 15, 25 years or something. Yeah, well, yeah. Right, enough of that frivolity. Begin question, Master. On this playground session. I've got to come back. Plethora. Is that the right word? Plethora. Plethora. Yep. Row? Can I have a row on the end of it? Plethora. No. Plethora. Questions from a number of different social platforms, not trying to keep it equal opportunity. So we've got Facebook and Instagram this week. Oliver Kelly on Facebook. Real name. We think so. Can you start with a compliment? I feel like we've a couple of questions. A few. Particularly the high ones, don't start with amazing what you're doing high. Yeah. Well, but Oliver Kelly, I even shortened it because it was that long. I don't want to read it all out and bore people with it, but I made a note that he actually put a really nice message about the growth of the school and what we're doing and being very supportive. So Oliver, massive thank you for that and everyone else that is saying. But his question, and obviously gets, the compliment gets his question asked and answered, can you tell me if it's better to do handstand training on the floor or on bars? I seem to get on better with bars and my left shoulder feels a lot better as it doesn't like when my hands are strung on the floor. But it's happy with the bars. Thanks so much. And I've also got a question related to that is, and I don't think we can answer it yet today, do all the handstands for the world record have to be just on the floor? It's probably a good question to ask in this, isn't it? I assume it will be, but whether someone had tiny little things, I don't know, they might be like... I feel like from what I've understand the moment that it needs to be straight arms and straight legs. I don't know that it necessarily then has to be the point of contact with the ground whether that's what we'll find out. Yes, we'll speak to Guinness. I am also once, I would like to know from Guinness how they're going to ratify plus 399 people doing a handstand. Well, 10,000. We've got a couple of questions to ask, yeah. Well, we'll add it to the list. Yeah. Everyone's got to do a selfie while they're doing it. So, yeah, the difference between... His question that I think is just to touch on specifically is that word better. Like he's asking which one is better. So your handstand is on the floor and on bars and I think that word better is a key part to that question. You can begin if you like. You can delve into that. Deep dive. I'll take it. Let's take a deep dive into that handstand where... So I pick up on the term better because I don't necessarily... Well, if one gives you pain and the other one doesn't, it's probably better to do the one that doesn't give you pain, but it's not necessarily this one's better than that one. It's more about understanding that they're different and then why they're different and then you can start to rationale why that might be. So when your hand's flat on the floor, you've got more internal rotation happening than when you go into the hands on the power... As long as you go in the hands on the parallel bars in a neutral position, then it takes some load off the wrist because that's now not extended anymore, so that's going to just be straight down. It also gives you some relative external rotation on your shoulder. So it's probably... It might be related to that around your shoulder. Tell you something a little bit about your shoulder. It could be you've got an issue with the wrist and it's transferring up the chain. But certainly when people have niggles around the wrist in that neutral position, it'll often be easier, less painful, therefore better. But one isn't necessarily... I wouldn't say one is just categorically just better than the other. They're different. The balance is very different. You control the balance on the bar more with your wrist than with the... On your hand is on the floor, it's much more with your fingertips and gripping like that. So the skill part of balancing is a fair bit different in terms of what your hand is doing. That's my main sort of... I haven't got a lot to add to that one. To be honest, I think you've ticked it off. I think it comes down to which one do you want. Definitely work pain free. My suggestion would be to go and get someone to have a look at the shoulder because just the fact that it's in that position and painful is showing that there's a dysfunction and it may manifest itself in your hand-balancing practice of hand on the floor. But I'd be asking what's that doing on pull-ups and stuff. And you know you're only as strong as your weakest link. So if you've got an issue, they're going to get sore to that. They're going to see a physio and get them to have a quick look over it and put some rehab in the program if you need it. In terms of the variability of having some different skill sets of being, how to do some stuff on the floor and on bars. Like sometimes I just spend a bit of time practicing on the parallel bars because it's just a different challenge. But I'd like to be able to... I would say that if you're into hand-balancing and you're enjoying it, just being able to sort of apply that into different modalities is cool. Got my hand up because I would ask one... I've got just sort of one thing just because of what you've been doing recently with those deep handstand push-ups that if you want to do some strength work where you're going up and down in sort of pressing movements, whether it's a pike press-up or whether it's a full handstand, your range is limited by the floor, whereas if you've got bars effectively elevating your hand, then you actually can go through deep. So from a strength point of view, I probably would say the bars for that is better but equally could just put your hands on a step or a box or whatever to keep it flat. Yeah, that's something I think with when you're getting into pushing a side of it from a strength perspective, having the hands in neutral is going to play a lot more onto proportions of pec and anterior del because you're doing more strict shoulder flexion whereas when you're in a prog-stand position, we allow the elbow to flare slightly as we would do onto a bench press. So you take a bench press and it's not exactly the same because it's horizontal and vertical but the idea being that anatomically we change the joint position a little bit and therefore changes the muscle recruitment. So my deep handstand push-up hands on the floor is much better than my parallel bar handstand push-up partly because I think I've done more on the floor but it definitely feels like a different challenge. So it's different. No one is better than the other one I like the floor because I can do it anywhere. Yeah, yeah, I like it. So I think your key message to take away is go see a physio and sort that shoulder out before it turns into something that's actually stopping you at all. And it might just at the moment stop you from handstanding on the floor if you go too far it could stop you from handstanding in general. You've had your first shoulder issues and it's particularly frustrating. It's not an easy one to get back from. Trust me, I've had mine operated on twice. Not from calisthenics. Not from calisthenics, from rugby. From weightlifting. So, I hope that's helpful. That is quite a common question actually as well. Like the people ask questions about using bar square so it was a nice one to tick off. So thank you for that Oliver. Next up we have Muscle Up Trude. Quick one. Legend. Yes, from Instagram. Absolutely. Her real name is like Trude. I think she's in Sweden. On the line, because I'm looking forward to this. What is her real name? Well, she's got three bits which I find interesting. And it's trude like Ving or something. V-I-G-E I think. Do you recognise that? No, she is. And then like the last bits like stroma or something. Yeah, yeah. Something like that, isn't it? She's, yeah. Can you say stroma? Interestingly, Muscle Up Trude. That was her name before. And then she helped her. A really kind message. Well, we helped her learn the Muscle Up. So she couldn't Muscle Up until she, which was cool. So yes, and she's now become our first female flag. So she's like racking up the graduations, yeah, and redefining impossible following our, yeah, she's just following our guides out in Sweden. And she's said she should be coming to the Hansam board record. So if she'd come from Sweden, could be up there with the furthest distance travelled. There's a competition. I've got my eye on a couple of guys. Oh, you're not in the right or wrong way in Australia. I like it when someone asks me about the Hansam board record they go. Yeah, how do I like, I'm in the so-and-so, like how do I get them? I send them the emoji of a plane. Right, anyway. So hello, I have a question for your podcast. Of course, I'm a huge fan of your school. It's amazing how you connect people all around the world through your social network and your competence. That last word might... That's good. Yeah. It didn't attract me because we're competent. Okay. I didn't feel like a really like flaring red, I don't know. I just swapped it in my head to like because you're amazing. Do you find that someone says you're competent? You're a bit like, I want to be more than you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Competence is just like, you're all right, like you're competent. When we took our UKSA exams, you either get, which is our Strennig, Christian accreditation, you are the competent or not competent, which basically means not competent or not going to hurt somebody, but it still doesn't really mean that you know what you're doing. I think that's how you're kind of... Yeah, that's how I was... Yeah, I think it was lost in translation. She meant like, you guys are cool. When you practice... So the question is about Hans-Anne's, about practicing the frog to Hans-Anne, she's doing some great work on that, and she feels that she's got the strength, but not the balance. So what should be her top priority, which I thought was interesting? Yeah. And she put content she's trying to... Second guess. So I'm trying to second guess you to him, head of Hans-Anne's, so continue to use the wall, and then she's put that emoji with like the little hands and an upside-down smiley face. Don't I do that? Cool. Yeah, I think... The thing about the frog stand to Hans-Anne's is that you need both those things at the same time. So strong enough to be able to push out is one thing, but can you apply that strength in an unstable environment when your knees are no longer on your elbow, or you're always no longer resting on your knees, and then push up in the right direction. So having that kinesthetic awareness of where your body is in space and where your feet are in relation, because what we see a lot of people doing is they're in the frog stand, they try and push out, and they end up pushing out at 45 degrees. They think they're going vertical. A little bit around that is actually, I think the brain taking a preferential activation pattern of going, well, actually if I drop the feet down, that becomes more of a chest-based movement. I'm stronger at pushing horizontally, so I'm going to try and make it that position more achievable as opposed to keeping the hips high and pushing vertically up. So totally agree that if you feel like you've got the strength, is it a balanced perspective? It is, but it's a combination of those two things together. One thing I will be starting to try and do maybe is still using the wall because that helps you to get that pattern of understanding of where your feet are whilst you're applying strength, and can you then start to use the wall less whilst doing hands, the wall-hands-hand push-ups? If you've got the strength, I'm assuming that you can do a wall-hands-hand push-up, which I would be my first port-of-call if you're going to press out, those should be feeling pretty comfortable. And I would say that sometimes, and this happens to us all the time as well, we think it might still be that you're not strong enough, but don't take that badly, but just that might be part, that could be part of it. And I'd potentially look at going, one thing to throw into the mix that I used quite well when I was struggling to get that frog to handstand, balancing at the top, and then actually trying to then stay off the wall and then try to come down to that frog or try to come down to a took position, but without using the wall at all. So you're working loads of balance and that strength at the same time controlling through, because it is a bit of a funny movement as you come down. You have to shift a bit of weight forward as you bring your bum down, otherwise you just lose that balance point. So that's definitely one to try, one of the tools on the eccentric. Yeah, the other one that I've seen people doing, which I think is actually quite good, we haven't used a huge amount in the guides, but getting a resistance band, looping it around a bar and then having it around your hips and actually allowing that band to give you a little bit of support. So you have it around while you're in the frog stand and as you take your knees off to be able to press out, the band just gives you a little bit of support from a strength perspective, but it also guides your hips towards where the bar is, so it starts to pull you more vertically. You've seen from the Hans Land series we did recently that we quite like that took Hans Land position if you can create it because it's a short lever length, you've got less variables, you've got to manage and worry about, so you haven't got as much neural information which your brain is then starting to try and understand and then process of these small adjustments that we need to make at different points in the chain, hands, shoulders, core, feet, whatever it might be. So it feels like it's not a particularly straightforward answer because you've almost just got to find out where your weak link is and where you're struggling, but I think if you combine in some of those things of pushing and getting good at pushing while you're not relying on the wall, but having the wall there if you need it, the only other one that came to mind was that it is a difficult exercise if you went headstand against the wall and then tried to press out from a headstand from a strength perspective because what you're doing is starting in a stable position and then have you got the strength to drive your hips up and a dead position, and a dead position which is hard. But if you can get some of that nail down, then you just really, if you can do that, 100% strong enough, all you then need to do is actually understand are you pushing and keeping your hips in the right position at the right time, and when you press out, you've then got to start to, as you get into that straight position, you've got to start to integrate all those little corrections so that your feet end up in the right place because your tendency might be to push up banana back and all of a sudden you're going to go straight over the top. So maybe some video feedback on that for you will be useful, film yourself, and then when you fail the rep, is it feet coming down? If it's feet coming down, you're pushing too far out on a horizontal pattern. If your feet are going over the top, you're not keeping a core, a midsection tight enough to actually line yourself up. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think like with the handstand stuff, for that frog to handstand, you need that, like you said at the beginning, you need that balance, you need that strength, and it's something that like, I practice my balance still all the time, I practice the strength, whereas I always do like, handstand push-ups, pike push-ups, and just balance work. Like you're always going to be working on those two things, just constantly, as you're trying to just improve, improve, improve, improve. So, I hope that gave you a plenty, that's probably good. It gave him more than enough ideas there to crack on. Yeah, there was. There were too many. I thought he was just going, he was just going, yeah, just try the wall. It's really need to filter some of that out. But yeah, but it gives you something to play around with and to explore, and then like Tim says, it's trying to find out what's the like, key thing for you, what's the most number, most number. I like the idea of, I heard someone talking about like the domino effect. There's lots of things you could do, but what's like the one main thing that would knock down the rest of the domino, so that try and figure what out? When I learned to handstand, I wasn't using a lot of the exercises that we use now, and I was coming from a point of a fairly good strength training background, but we've definitely added more options for people. But I learned from just trying to press out, and I started from a point where I was strong enough to go from, I could push myself from a frog stand and get my hips up, where I couldn't do his balance. So a lot of people have started from a point where they need to develop more shoulder strength to be able to do that. But I only use a handful of exercises, and it's picking those which are the right ones for where you're at, which means you can move forward, don't bite off too much, because I think there's so much around a handstand as a skill perspective if the actually constant exposure to the same and correct stimulus is going to move you much further forward rather than trying to go and going to do 10 different exercises, just get really good at a few, and then you'll start to siphon out the ones which are adding value and those which aren't, and you should be moving forwards within that. So I hope that gives you plenty of ideas and help for your handstand training, whether it's Dew, Trude, or whether it's any of you out there working on your handstands, and wanting to come and help us break that world record at the hashtag handstand challenge, world record attempt. You don't have to, just on that, you don't have to press out from a frog stand. You just have to hold the handstand. Get into it however you like. Yeah, get into it however you like, but you're more than welcome to do it from the frog stand. We like that because you're building pressing strength for a bent arm position that's going to help you to do like handstand push-ups and other things as we go forward. But you only need to, you only need to literally get up and hold that handstand. So we've got the eight week, eight week, eight lesson handstand, beginner's handstand guide if you are interested in a week by week programme that takes you all the way through from literally zero to being able to hold that handstand ready for the handstand world record. So check that out. Good, any more questions guys, stick them in the comments below or send them to us on whichever of your preferred social media platform and if we try and bring the questions to Q&A, they're going to be the most matter of value to the most matter of people, but we do try and get back to everybody who asks us. So if there's anything we can help with, stick the comments in and I think until next time. Class dismissed.