If you have trouble with consistency in your handstand training, I have some thoughts here for you that will hopefully make you broaden your perspective on the influencing factors that hold you back.
In the last five years of being a Personal Trainer something became very obvious for me: your environment is just as important as your willpower when it comes to sticking with your training!
I also got the chance of experiencing this during our trip around the world, in which most of the time my environment changes in a matter of days and it’s hard to predict things and therefore hard to build routines. But what struck me just a couple of days ago was the importance of your social environment in staying consistent.
About two weeks ago my phone slowly started to die and Instagram wouldn’t let me post anything. And because of my phone being so slow, it had a hard time of doing basically anything on social media. So not only was my environment new, but also all the people I was talking to about handstands on social media were suddenly gone. Plus I had my family around which made it hard to focus on good practice. It made me think about the power of the circumstances and the people around me on the quality and consistency of my training and how limited our willpower is.
You see, willpower is a limited source that as soon as you’re under stress or have a lot of things on your plate can diminish your good purposes pretty quickly. So setting up your environment in a way that favourises your training is a way to keep you on track. Because the bad times will come, no matter how obsessed you are.
Setting up your environment can be as simple as joining a gym/circus school with good environment for practice or even handbalancing courses instead of just practicing alone, or it can be to plan out your training before you do it, so the component of having to think about what you’ll actually do won’t hinder you. Take a look at what is the thing that keeps you away from training, when you actually planned to do it. The thing that helps me personally the most, is having a coach – one person that checks up on me, keeps me accountable, takes care of my programming and simply demands progress from me. In my opinion, having a coach for yourself is the single best tool for consistency and progress.
Besides setting up your environment, the second thing that makes you stick with your plan is learning to say “no”. This simply means that the time you plan for your training becomes non-negotiable. A big part of this is making your training plan as realistic as possible, being clear on your priorities in life and where to locate your training on this list of priorities.
Now I’m not saying that everybody needs to be strict with their handstand training! Of course all of this depends on what your goal is and how much importance you put to your practice. But if you’re serious about wanting to improve, the fact is that there is work to be done on a consistent basis (may it be 1x or 6x per week) in order to get there.
I hope you can get something useful out of this episode and I’ll be happy to read about your comments! Let us know what keeps you from training and what you can do to improve it.
Remember that the world is you playground, so just do whatever you love!
-Soundschi