As gymnastics and acrobatic coaches, we are always telling our gymnasts that the more time they spend on their hands, the happier we will be. You need a handstand for every piece of gymnastic apparatus, and for acrobatic gymnastics and performance we raise the bar to one-hand balance as well. In this post we offer a variety of very fit guys performing handstands in different situations: most are pretty cool, one or two are reasonable first efforts but mis-shapen! We leave you to sort those out.  Beau tries hard in his planche... ...maybe aiming for this... Interesting one from Yevgeny... And a shaping exercise for the basic gymnast's handstand: Training for swing to handstand on parallel bars: Ordinary pix to finish off the post - rather random hand balances:

 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

Hard training, fun exercises, even gymnasts just mucking around! Every which way, a display of the value of fitness and training for sure.   Definitely don't wear a tee-shirt when tumbling! And infally the yoga bit. #1 has a flexible girl taking part in what looks like fun: in #2 the bridge should have straight legs, but even so...