One Hand or Two? (2023/319)

 First you learn to balance on both hands. Then, if successful and you develop your muscle and sense of balance in the right way, you can go on one hand alone, for which there is a whole variety of positions. Moving between them calls for a great deal of flexibility as well as strength.

This post covers all sorts of situations in which the entire bodyweight is supported on the hands - i.e. includes planching.

First of all, let Rohan show the way:

But to begin at the beginning...

And again:

There we go: shape, muscle control and some endurance to stay there.

Christiano Rujana adds the flexibility element:

...which can lead to more elaborate shapes...

Chinese version (handstand, not the guy!):

Specific training of core strength helps a lot:

There are a load of other exercises you need to do, but that's too much technical stuff for this post. Once you are able to handstand, you can move around and get stronger still:

See this guy's confidence in pushups on the bar:

Note that it is the muscles in the shoulders and back that really contribute to the handstand: the triceps just get you there, and get even stronger with the pushups. Again:

Another way of movning around: stepping (up!):

Start young (if you still ARE young!!)... and moving REAL SLOW is an amazingly good way of training - here's Yevgeny:

He's good on pirouettes too:

Real cool to see a re-run from below! Some guys take long walks: (hotel corridors are really good for tumbling practice as well!):

OK - some ordinary pictures of guys performing handstands on two hands: some good, some (shall we say) good efforts but could do better!

That's hotel-corridor boy Riley S again - gymnast, inevitably, and with a class act.

 Let's not overlook the usefulness of parallel bars...

Yevgeny again, with Andreii Kiselev: here they are again in a handstand race:

Taking things to a high level, the acrobatic gymnasts can set up some challenges: 'catch!'...

...and so to one-arm balance:

And, professionally...

Tiego and Jack can show off a few different positions for us:

Some one-arm variety here, then:

In the intro I mentioned the planche, but we haven't seen uch of that, so here are a couple:

'Croc' on planche there - balance work at its best.

So...why not give it a go? Get together wth some friends, support one another, use walls and things to get used to the feel of things: then work on the shape... and then have some fun competitions! In today's final pic we have six guys against one lady: she didn't win!

Best shape is nearest, and there is one we like to call 'banana back' at thge end which indicates poor shoulder flexibility. We have a training for that, but that can wait for another day!

By the way, there is a humongous archive of over 1000 prevous fitness posts on this blog, so why not have a tour through the archive posts? Here is one we've chosen at random, also on balancing,  to get you started: CLICK HERE...

...and then one on something entirely different - hard work in the weights gym... CLICK HERE