Palm Reading - What Your Hands Are Telling In Your Handstands

When you’re doing a handstand, do you ever pay attention to your hands? Ever notice if your fingers are gripping too hard, or if the weight resting mainly in your wrists, or is it concentrated in one central spot?

OVER BALANCE vs. UNDER BALANCE
When we’re balancing on our hands, they can play a crucial role in understanding our relationship to where the balance is. Your hands are the only body parts that are touching the floor, so in essence they are the only connection you have with the floor.

When you’re over-balancing, it means that most of your weight is going towards your fingertips, and when that happens you’re probably using your fingers a lot just to maintain balance and from falling over. When you’re under-balancing, it means most of your weight isn’t being stacked enough, and you’re constantly falling back the way you came up, it feels like you’re losing grip on your handstand.

Knowing this information is important because when you’re balancing, you need every bit of information you can get to make the right adjustments and that’s what balance is all about.

CENTERED 

Ideally, you want to keep your weight centered in one place on your hands.

Not too far forward.

Not too far behind.

Not bouncing forward and back.

You want to keep it in one place - Centered. At least that’s the goal.

The best weight placement is having your weight evenly in the four corners of your palms, so your weight is even, well-balanced, and controllable. This would be the most ideal and efficient way to do it, but having your weight just a little bit in front, on the “over-balanced” side can also be beneficial because you can use your fingertips slightly to help you grip the floor.

Just don’t overdo it, over-relying on your fingertips to maintain balance would create bad habits and a false sense of where you are centered.

RADAR

When you’re balancing on 2-arms, you’re likely to fall two ways, forward or back. So treat your hands as a radar to see which way you’re currently leaning towards so you can adjust your body back to the opposite direction to adjust to balance.

Let’s say you’re in a handstand and you feel your fingertips are overly heavy, digging deep into the floor and on the verge of falling over. This could have many different alignment implications, but if your line is generally straight, it could mean you’re leaning a little too far forward at a slight slant. You can still balance here but just not as efficiently.

The adjustment then would be to pull your weight back to the side of the wrists, not too much but just enough so you sit nicely in the middle.

With experience, you should be able to recognize the sensations on your hands in nanoseconds and know which direction you are leaning to make the necessary adjustments.

Keep in mind that your hands are in a passive role where they will relate information, but it’s up to the rest of the body to actively act on it.

This is why when you’re in a handstand, one of the biggest clues to knowing where you are is through your hands. Whether your hands are too light, or your fingertips are working too hard, all these are clues to what adjustments you need to make.

So start noticing the sensation of your hands each time you go up into a handstand, it’s one of the best tools for real-time live adjustments.