Three Faults Killing Your Handstand Walking

If you are struggling to perfect your handstand walking, then avoid these three killer faults that often crush your performance! Our gymnastics coach, Pamela Gagnon, has several great cues and technique fixes for your handstand walking in this video!

 

Handstand Walking Faults Transcript

Pamela Gagnon here from Performance Plus, and we are discussing why you may suck at handstand walks.

First, do you even have a freestanding handstand? So that’s the foundational movement of handstand walking. So let’s make sure we get better handstand positioning and awareness. Grab a band, you’re going to put your feet together, step on the band, press tall, and I want your ears covered by your arms, and I want your chin at forty-five, wiggle your fingers, and this is your head position and upper body position for a stacked perfect handstand.

Second, I want you to take a PVC pipe. We’re going to put our arms out wide and then we’re going to push the PVC back with our head, and we’re going to try and get our arms up in a straight line. This is basically showing me shoulder and overhead mobility and if I can pull into a press step position without having to over-arch. So those are two drills you can work on for body awareness, stacking, and positioning in the static handstand.

Improving Your Handstand Walking by Avoiding These Faults

Here is fault number one. When you kick up, your head is a safety mechanism, and you stick it out really far. So that does close your shoulder angle and force your hips to stay in the start position. So what we want to make sure of is that we start in a nice line, and we think about pulling down and around instead of out and press. Or push away. So we don’t want to push the mats away. We want to press down.  To start our handstand walking.

The second thing is we want to ensure that our hips follow our hands. So this is the second fault. When we start walking, our hands get too far in front of our hips. So how do we solve this? Well, this cue will help a lot. We want to think about pushing our armpits to the start wall. So this is the wall I’m starting to look at, and I’m going press my armpits over to that wall, which will fix my hip position and send me into a more stacked position. Let’s take a look at both of those put together. First, I’m going to start with my head in line, and I’m going to press down. Second, I will push my armpits to the wall, and I will be able to walk stacked. So those are the first two faults I see.

The third final fault that is usually highlighted the most is our arms are too wide. So think about if we were to hold our barbell here versus hold our barbell here or our dumbbell. We have more stability over the midline of our body. So if we start with our arms too wide, we have to shift our weight farther. So you’ll notice I’m shifting back and forth. If I start more under my shoulders, I’m already under midline, and I have to move my body position less to shift the weight. So consider those three things next time you try to handstand walk.