Those of you who have read my Return of Kings articles know that I am a man who advocates a substantial amount of bodyweight/calisthenic training in addition to weight training—the reason for this being that while weights are certainly good for building muscular strength and hypertrophy, I feel that you cannot truly be strong unless you are capable of moving your own body. A man who cannot do at least a regular push-up has no business doing weight training, and mastering bodyweight training can only make you stronger in your regular weight/resistance training.

A major part of proper bodyweight training is of course the handstand, the calisthenic equivalent to the overhead press that will give you a tremendous amount of size and strength to your shoulders and upper arms. You can read my previous work on that topic right here.

After practicing the wall mounted handstand and handstand pushup for a sufficient amount of time, the trainee will likely want to perform a “free” handstand, which is to say what most people think of when they hear the term “handstand”. Which is to say, a handstand that is done against nothing but air and faith—no wall, no partner, or no support of any other kind.

However, I guarantee that your first attempt at kicking up into said handstand will go exactly as the cynical would expect it to go:  with you sailing head over heels and landing flat on your back, definitely injuring and quite possibly discouraging yourself, often making the tyro trainee give up on the dream as soon as they began. This is of course because your body has never done a free handstand, so why should you expect to be able to do one off the bat? It’s the same as any other form of advanced calisthenic exercise—your central nervous system and connective tissues literally have to be trained to move in those ways, just as the muscles have to be trained to exert the proper amount of force.

Rather, much like any other form of advanced bodyweight training, you have to go through a progressive series of steps to accomplish this, even if you’ve mastered the one-handed handstand push-up off the wall from my previous handstand push-up article. And these progressive steps are what this article deals with.

Step 1: The Free Headstand

To begin training the free handstand, you will have to…go back to the wall. I know, it seems awfully regressive, but just bear with me. You’re not going back to the wall in the way that you would expect to—using it as a support for your legs. Instead of having your back to the wall—as you’ve been doing for the handstand push-ups, you’re instead going to have your stomach to the wall.

Starting in a push-up position on the floor, “walk” your feet up the wall until your body is vertical. Then lower yourself to the floor, resting on your head and hands. Once you’ve gotten into that position, gently kick your feet away from the wall (and I specify “gentle”—doing so too forcibly will of course result in your landing flat on your back). You are now doing, more or less, a free headstand!

You will immediately notice the difficulty of this maneuver as your entire body struggles to maintain its balance in this precarious position. Holding this position statically will nonetheless provide a tremendous workout for your spine, shoulders, and arms. When you can hold the free headstand for 30 seconds, you can move on.

Step 2: The Crow Stand

The first step that is totally away from the wall, and while it may not look…anything like an actual handstand, it works many of the same muscles used in that nigh-impossible feat. To begin, take the pose that is shown in the picture below.

Then shift your weight forward onto your hands, eventually leaving your feet completely. Holding this pose puts great strain on the muscles and joints of the arms and shoulders, in a manner similar to the proper handstand. Once again, when you can hold this for 30 seconds, it is time to move on to the next step of this progressive series.

Step 3: The Tiger Stand

This exercise and pose is so named because of the fact that the trainee’s arms, with the elbows pointed back and the upper arms resting upon the forearms, will resemble the paws of a big cat when held in this position. To begin the tiger stand, go back to the wall, get into your pushup position, and walk your feet up to a vertical position, as you did before with the free headstand. Then bend the elbows back until your forearms are flat on the ground—be sure not to crash down hard on the ground, thus causing injury to the head, neck, elbows, or wrists. As with most things in calisthenic training, the key is to move slowly and deliberately.

Once you’re in this position, you will once again kick away from the wall gently and try to hold yourself up without any support. Not using your head as a fulcrum (as in the free headstand) will make this exercise more difficult than the previous two exercises, but the tiger stand is still easier than a true free handstand. When you can hold the tiger stand for 30 seconds, you can then move on to that last step: the true, free handstand.

Step 4: The Handstand

From here, you probably know what you have to do to get into this position. Do your normal walk up from the push-up position until your body is vertical. Extend your body straight and vertical (if you really imagine your spine and legs “extending” upwards, I find that helps maintaining your balance) and kick off the wall. Once your feet are off the wall, try to hold yourself up! It seems simple, but it is, as you can imagine, very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that you’ll likely stumble the first time around, but you do this close to the wall for a reason—so you can fall back on it should you mess up.

Just keep trying to hold the free handstand for time. Even if you can only do it for a second or two, that’s a good start. And each time you do the free handstand, try to do it for longer periods of time. Even if you can just add a second or two each time, that is more than acceptable progress.

Once you can hold the free handstand for 30 seconds or more, you can try doing  handstand without any wall support, by vaulting into the position like in the image below

And once you’ve mastered an entirely unsupported free handstand, you can then start to try doing free handstand push-ups and other techniques. Indeed, you can try to go through the handstand push-up progression to the point where you’re doing unsupported, one-handed handstand pushups.

But regardless of what you do, the free handstand is always one of the fundamentals of bodyweight training, and THE foundational position of gymnastics. If you want to build real strength using just your body, get to those handstand pushups!