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Get Ready for Handstands: Hand Position and Balance

Handstands might be simple, but they aren't easy. Paying attention to how your hands interface with the ground will make them easier.

Justin Lind

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This is the seventh part of a comprehensive handstand video series designed to bring you toward a strong and stable free-standing handstand. While this video will bring benefit to your training regardless of your current fitness or goals, it is intended as part of larger handstand series. I encourage you to check out all of the preceding parts:

Hand Balancing and Engagement

I was recently discussing this series with a fellow coach who cheekily said, “What do you need multiple videos on handstands for? Just put your hands on the ground and your feet in the air.” He’s not wrong.

All joking aside, handstands are simple, but not easy. If you simply practiced all the time, you would eventually find balance. But this series aims to help you pattern in the best possible alignment and arm you with the tools to develop your balance quickly and effectively.

Over the last six weeks, we have opened up the proper alignment and developed the core strength and overhead stability to hold a solid handstand. This week’s video focuses on a few “secret weapons” of amazing handstanders. 

The video below offers a few simple, yet profound engagement tools to hone in your balance, and several progressively more difficult positions in which to practice them.

Justin Lind

About Justin Lind

Justin Lind has been an athlete and student his whole life. While hobbies and sports have come and gone, one thing has remained: a commitment to constant improvement of movement quality. Besides an obsession for health and athletics, Justin remains the consummate student and teacher.

Justin has a passion for learning how to glean the most valuable information from many different communities and philosophies. A former mechanical engineer turned coach and writer; he applies his analytical and structural ways of thinking to the world of health, fitness, and athletics.

While training heavily as a competitive Olympic lifter and CrossFit regionals athlete, Justin suffered a back injury that completely shifted his fitness and movement paradigm. He committed to understanding the flip side of intense training: recovery, mobility, and self-care. Justin soon left engineering to focus on creating empowered athletes who are highly in-tune with their bodies.

In addition to a B.S. in mechanical engineering from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Justin holds certifications in CrossFit Level 1, RKC Level II, and USA Gymnastics.

Justin is currently travelingthe U.S. full-time. He offers remote coaching and workshops for both kettlebells and gymnastics skills at CoachJustinLind.com.

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