In this episode I show you two of the exercises that have helped one of my online students massively improve his shoulder line in handstands.
When Alejandro came to me about 6 months ago he could already balance for a short time, but he was having big issues with opening his shoulders not only in the handstand, but also just standing on his feet. So the way he would balance was in a big banana handstand. And because this is pretty inefficient, his holding times were limited.
We put a lot of effort in the last 6 months in opening and strengthening his overhead position. We did it both, by improving his flexibility separately from the handstand exercises and also by implementing his newly gained range of motion in the different handstand exercises, which mainly included variations of tucks, straight and straddle handstands facing the wall.
The key to improvement
The key is to scale the exercises in a way that you can actually access your new range of motion in handstands. This can mean that you have to regress quite a bit. The tuck exercise I show in the video has a pretty low box, that wouldn’t have worked for Alejandro. So he worked with a higher one, prioritising his being able to spend time in the desired shoulder position. Then you can take it from there and develop further.
These are only two of a couple exercises we did, but I hope that you can take away the concept and figure out how to implement it for your situation.
Of course, as always, feel free to ask any questions. I would also love to hear about your experience! If you have managed to improve your shoulder line, let us know about how you did it and your struggles!
The world is your playground, so just go ahead and do whatever you love!
-Soundschi