In a hand-balancer’s training there is one important milestone – when you can stand on your hands without support and any considerable movement for 60 seconds. This article describes my journey to a 60-second handstand.
60 seconds
If you’re practicing handstands and you have at least some ambitions you’ll eventually start to peek at a one arm handstand. As my teachers have told me, even for those who can do one-arm, training can begin when you can stand more or less without problems in a handstand for 60 seconds. Then you have handled the basics and it’s time to focus on more difficult things. No wonder that 60-seconds is an important milestone. It’s just a number, 61 or 59 is almost the same, but mentally it’s an important milestone.
Beginning
I begun to seriously train handstand on November 4, 2013, i.e. 11 month ago. Before that, as I have already described here, I made several uncoordinated trips into handstand-land but each time I rejected it saying it’s not for me, deadlift is better. This changed progressively as I was learning more and more from Ido Portal. The turning point was last year in Singapore when I found out that my handstand is a tragedy (unlike everything else we did there). I was truly the worst one there. So I said to myself that the rest of my training goes to maintanance and that I would do only handstands. I have found Yuval and… and the rest is history.
Training with Yuval
Yuval’s training was “simple” – 5 times a week, an hour, just drills for handstand and handstand itself. Each training has to be recorded in a diary, once a week send the diary and video by email. So around five hours a week. I trained with Yuval for 8 months. Besides two weeks when I trained only 3 times a week, it was 5 times a week. Like a clockwork. I wasn’t doing a handstand for max. 3 or 4 days. I have each day of training in my diary, each week on YouTube. After 8 months I came to a conclusion that I needed to be training by myself now, without the pressure on diary and video. Yuval understood that, so the last 3 months I was following only my feeling, but still 5 or 6 times a week. The first 3-4 months I was doing the same things each training, no changes. Then Yuval made a slight change, adding something, removing something else. It took a LONG time for my shoulders to open properly; after all, sitting in front of a computer for 30 years has its consequences.
There were times when I was pretty desperate, I couldn’t do it, the progress wasn’t linear at all; sometimes I made 20 seconds and sometimes hardly 5 seconds. When I complained to Yuval that I couldn’t do it, he wrote to me: “Take a breath, smile and try it again. You don’t have a choice anyway.” That’s Zen, isn’t it? I remembered that many times. He also used to say: “You and your pessimistic moods…”
I had a cold, my wrist was aching, I was on a vacation or travelling, I had a nosebleed (not related to a handstand), we were moving to different flat, or I was working all day – I did a handstand in the evening and worked on the position. As I mentioned before, my typical training time is from 10 pm till 11 pm. It’s far from being ideal but I just don’t have time during the day.
…Take a breath, smile and try it again. You don’t have a choice anyway.
Yuval Ayalon
I was doing a handstand outside, inside, in the living room, on a visit, on playground, at the relatives’, during a weekend with friends, in office, in hotel room, in park, on toilet (nowhere else to do it), in woods, on street, on grass, on terrace, on sand, on concrete, on asphalt, in jeans, in shorts, in shirt… Everywhere. Kind of obsession. Or consistency?
Ido once said that people used to tell him that children doing handstands were making walls dirty (sounds familiar, we had to paint the whole flat…). He replied: “Let them dirty the walls motherfuckers”. And continued that handstand is a very precious skill but you already know that, I have written about it many times.