Warming up for Handstands
Warming up is often part of the session I spend the most time procrastinating, be it when programming for others or executing myself.
This is probably because warming up is one of the most intuitive parts of the session, that can be influenced by many variables such as sleep, hydration, temperature, mood etc.
The purpose of a warm up is to 1) Get the body in a state of readiness to perform its training activity. 2) Evaluate the body and mind through movement to establish a perception of how the session might go. 3) Use the evaluation to inform any alterations to the warm up or the session.
From the above process you may decide within a few minutes that your joints feel really good… muscles feel well activated… and within no time you're hitting some great handstands. However this phenomenon may be few and far between and you may need to spend far longer to get up to readiness. Familiar examples may be lack of motivation to exercise, tightness or stiffness in the joints, limited range of motion, feeling cold, not being able to perceive yourself doing the first variation of the session.
With this said the below structure provides a framework to our warm ups to get us up to readiness in most scenarios:
When applying this framework I suggest you start with as little as possible.. Let's say 1-2 exercises from each section, so 4-8 exercises total that you feel generally you need to do to prepare for handstand. Then as you go through you can use your intuition to decide if you need to do more or not. I often extend my warm up into the session itself if needed by performing exercises in between sets of my handstands.
If you’re one of those people who could spend an hour warming up, I also find it useful to set a timer as a time cap for the warm up (around 10 minutes), this works especially well if you are training under time constraints.
Finally, there will come a time when you need to alter the session. It can go both ways, sometimes you may want to add more seconds to the hold time because you did it in only one set, but others you’re going to have to drop the volume or even leave exercises out. The warm up, as discussed, can be a great tool to make such decisions. Your perception pre-warm up can often be quite cloudy, but once you get moving you’ll often feel things clearer and be able to decide if them tight lats from all the pull ups the previous day are going to restrict you from getting into a good overhead position, regardless of mobilisations, and you may have to settle for another scheduled day such as L-sits and lower limb flexibility. This level of intuition on mental adaptability is key to a sustainable training career.
