Why handstands are the ideal exercise class – even if, like me, you're not very good

I’ve been doing handstands for almost two years now. By ‘doing handstands’, I do not mean ‘doing handstands successfully’. I mean I have been trying to do a handstand for almost two years and I still haven’t succeeded.

Sometimes I half-succeed. Sometimes I kick up and I can hold myself, suspended upside down, for five, six, maybe seven seconds. But those moments are few and far between and I can often only confidently kick up if I know that someone or something is there to catch me (a person or a wall will do).

Learning to handstand is, therefore, an exercise in humility. In the fast-paced 21st century world where we expect to be able to do almost anything with a little help from instructional videos on YouTube, handstands require dedication, failure, and above all, time.

As a result, perhaps, they’re not that trendy. Handstands classes are not exactly the new fitness craze. I still get quizzical looks whenever I tell people about my favourite hobby, and you see the same few people at the various classes across London. They are, however, all over Instagram. Every photogenic fitness aficionado has pictures of themselves doing what look like effortless hand balances in yoga classes, where they apparently ‘float’ straight onto their hands. In my experience, however, there’s nothing effortless about a handstand. I’ve never managed to ‘float’ my body anywhere, let alone all my weight onto my hands.

My ‘handstand journey’ started because I had been attending an exercise class with a trainer called Tom Whelan, who kept showing off his upside-down skills and I was jealous of his abilities. He offered to teach me and a few other of his clients after hours on a weekday evening, and it cannot be taken as a poor reflection of his patience or skills as a teacher that none of us have quite nailed it two years later. I now take regular classes with both Tom and another trainer, Sammy Dinneen, but I'm still a long way off holding the position for longer than a few seconds.

A handstand class is just what it sounds like – an hour, sometimes two, spent practising handstands. You usually start by warming up your wrists and fingers before moving on to some conditioning drills borrowed from calisthenics, an exercise protocol that relies on bodyweight movements to train your body. These help because you need strength, flexibility, and balance to attain and maintain a good handstand.

The challenge of a handstand is to keep your shoulders stacked below your hips and both positioned in straight line above your hands. You need to have flexible shoulders to get your body into that straight line, and strong shoulders and a solid core to keep your body in the required alignment. In a handstand class, therefore, you need to spend a bit of time building strength and developing endurance. This often just means spending longer and longer stretches on your hands – ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty seconds at a time. If you’re me, you do this against a wall or supported by a person.

However – and this is where handstand classes begin to differ from so many of the mirror-obsessed classes that are to be found in most gyms these days – learning to stand on your hands doesn't promise an overnight body transformation. No one goes to handstand classes to get fitter or get slimmer. Yes, they are hard work – but while my endurance for standing upside-down has improved over the past two years, I don’t look much different to how I did when I started. But it is, nonetheless, a joy. Rather than focusing on pounds lost and muscle tone gained, I spend all my time thinking about hip positions and wrist strength.

It possibly helps that there is no grand philosophy underpinning handstands – no grating spiritualism or escalating levels of understanding. People do handstands because they look cool and they feel fun. Classes are in no way intimidating; we know what we're doing is inherently a bit funny. And the fact that the skill in question is largely without purpose makes it all the more enjoyable.

Over the past couple of years, I've found that handstands are – and I speak only for myself here – an excellent substitute for a personality. No one at dinner parties is much interested in the work I do but telling anyone that I attend dedicated handstand classes two to three times a week gives me plenty of conversational mileage. That being said, I’ve made great handstand friends who have plenty of personality.

London life is not conducive to making new acquaintances and rarely do you get to follow through and turn occasional meetings into lasting friendships. Handstands have thrown me together with people from all walks of life on a regular basis to do something a bit unusual. This has helped bridge the social divides and atomisation of modern city living. It might sound grandiose, but handstands have made me happier and healthier.

Handstands might not have an underpinning philosophy, but they give me something that other exercise classes don’t. I think that is partly to do with how bad I still am at them. Except for jobs or academic degrees, I have never committed to anything for as long as I’ve committed to trying to handstand. And unlike academic degrees, there’s no certificate in sight. Instead, I’m seeking the brief and fleeting thrill of momentary success and the fragile satisfaction of very incremental improvement.

Two years of trial and mostly error, I still haven’t mastered it. But there are moments of weightless, balancing bliss, and when I look back over my time spent training, I can see definite improvement. After all, as Tom says: "Handstands are a bit like golf, every time you get one bit right, something else goes to pieces and you're all over the place. You'll have good days and bad days, but the good ones just seem to keep you coming back."

Have you ever tried a handstand to stay fit? What unconventional exercises do you use to maintain your fitness levels? Let us know in the comments section below. 

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