A (Playful) Yoga Practice to Take You Into Handstand

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In the years that I’ve been teaching Handstand, I’ve observed something surprising as I watch students take themselves upside down. The most essential component in learning an inversion isn’t physical ability. It’s a willingness to be playful.

Learning to come into Handstand can be a lengthy process. But it can also be a playful one when you release any expectations of instant gratification and instead celebrate each piece of the mind-and-body puzzle as you figure it out.

What You Need to Know to Come Into Handstand

Holding yourself upside down involves two opposing forces working in unison—feeling grounded and resisting gravity. So you need to work both with and against the laws of physics. Think of it as a tug-of-war.

I like to practice short, playful sequences that emphasize the movement patterns and muscular engagements that are required when you come into an inversion. Repeating these movements over and over again embeds the muscular actions in your memory so you can eventually perform the them automatically, without letting your thoughts or doubts or fears get in the way. Practicing them also challenges your coordination and brings familiarity to being upside down.

The poses and transitions require the utmost presence and attention from your entire body and mind, much like focusing your drishti in a pose or being in the zone for an athlete. Let your thoughts quiet. Allow the unraveling to happen in your body and brain as you take yourself through this twister of a sequence.

Things to remember as you prepare for Handstand

When you practice each of the following postures, you also practice many of the same actions demanded by Handstand. This repetition—and resulting familiarity—ensures that proper muscle engagement will seem like second nature to you by the time you attempt to take yourself upside-down. As you prepare to come into Handstand, you want to emphasize these basic components:

Spider Fingers
Keep your fingers bent as you place pressure on your fingertips and the knuckle pad of your thumb. This maintains some buoyancy in your knuckles.

Arms Straight and Strong
Plant your hands shoulder-distance apart. Externally rotate your upper arms and draw your biceps toward your center.

Protract Your Shoulder Blades
Move your shoulder blades away from the spine to create a slight turtle back (puffed-up upper back).

Pull Your Ribs Back
Engaging the core, especially the transversus abdominis, activates stability in the midsection and locking that to the lower body involves a special technique with the bandhas, specifically the Uddiyana bandha which is the low belly lock and facilitates much like a suction lock that moves the organs under the rib cage and locks the low belly around the spine. When you see a very sculpted suctioned stomach in a handstand – this is what is happening.

Draw Your Low Belly In
Engaging your core can help you maintain stability.

Look Straight Down 
Do not look too far forward. Where your gaze goes, your body tends to follow. Keep your eyes focused between your thumbs.

Posterior Tilt Your Pelvis
Tucking the tailbone slightly. This helps remove the curve in the lower back and controls the teeter-totter that can happen in Handstand.

Pull Your Thighs Inward
This activates the glutes and turns on the adductors that connect to the pelvic floor, creating stability throughout your core.

Activate Your Entire Body
Reach from your head all the way through your feet.

A (Playful) Yoga Practice to Take You Into Handstand

When you include asymmetry and twists to your practice, you start to tap into the strength and stability of your center and your cylinder of control. This allows you to feel what keeps you together, physically and mentally, even when you have opposing actions occurring simultaneously.

Have fun. Don’t get caught up in the cues or perfection. Simply let yourself move.

Suggested Warm-Up

1. Ardha Matsyendrasana (Half Lord of the Fishes or Seated Twist)

How to: Come into Seated Twist facing your right. Ground down and feel the stability of gravity. Before you twist, find space between your vertebrae by first stacking and expanding through your spine. Instead of imagining yourself wringing out, think about it more as everything isometrically pressing into something else. So your core pushes against your leg as your leg pushes into your arm as your arm pushes against your leg and so on.

Breathe: Inhale to create space, exhale to twist.

Transition: When you’re ready to come out, inhale as you turn more into the twist, exhale as you unravel out of your twist by turning in the opposite direction and coming onto hands and knees facing the back of the mat.

2. Bird Dog

How to: From hands and knees facing the back of the mat, make sure your hands are beneath your shoulders with your wrist creases face forward. Focus on keeping the center line of your body strong as you extend your right arm and your left leg parallel to the mat. A slight tuck of the tailbone will help draw your belly toward the spine for neutral core engagement that you need in Handstand. Keep checking to make sure that your shoulders, ribcage, and hip points remain square and the toes of the lifted leg are shining straight down like a flashlight toward the mat. Keep your foot flexed and pushing against an imaginary wall. Maintain the stability of your center line as you reach.

Breathe: Inhale reach even further, exhale focus on your center line.

Transition: Lower your extended right arm below your shoulder and press into the mat. Lower the ball of your lifted left leg to the mat, keeping your leg straight.

3. Bird Dog Plank

How to: Lift your bent right leg off the mat and extend it straight behind you. Pop onto the fingertips your left hand and play with extending your left arm alongside your ear. You are now in a Plank with the opposite leg and arm reaching in opposing directions, creating a tug of war throughout your entire body. To maintain control, activate your core and tap into your center axis, drawing your energy toward your center line.

Breathe: Keep your breath slow and steady.

Transition: Reverse back to Bird Dog by lowering your lifted knee and hand and lifting back into the same expression of Bird Dog you practiced a moment ago.

Exhale as you cross your extended left leg from Bird Dog behind your grounded right knee.

4. Parivrtta Gomukhasana (Revolved Cow Face Pose)

How to: Sit your hips back into Cow Face legs, attempt to stack your knees (right on top) and bring your feet outside of your hips. Do not sit on your feet. Inhale as you stack the spine, extending the crown of your head toward the ceiling to make space and twist in the direction of your top right leg.

Breathe: Exhale as you sit back into Cow Face Pose. Inhale as you stack the spine and twist.

Transition: Exhale as you unravel out of the twist and turn toward the left, placing your hands shoulder distance apart facing the front of the mat. Pivot on your right knee and left heel as you turn to face the front of the mat.

5. Prasarita Padottanasana (Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend or Standing Straddle)

How to: Come to a Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend facing the front of the mat with your knees slightly bent. Press your hands firmly into the mat with straight, strong arms. Look straight down between your thumbs and bring your chest toward your thighs. Check to make sure your wrist creases are parallel to the short edge of the mat. Spread your fingers out to grip the mat like a cat about to knead the carpet and take spider hands. Feel as if you’re holding the top of a push up, externally rotating your upper arms and pulling your biceps toward your center.

Breathe: Inhale as you come into the pose, exhale as you fold closer to your thighs, inhale as you come onto the balls of the feet with your upper body prepared for Handstand, exhale as you fold, inhale.

Transition: Stay in this position as you hop again or come into Handstand.

6.  Hop or Handstand

After your first hop in a wide-legged bend, your options are:

Rise onto the balls of your feet. Transfer most of your body weight into your arms. Keep the top-of-a-push-up engagement.

Take a small hop. Exhale and contract your belly as you take a small hop while keeping your feet low and close to the mat. Land with bent legs. Start slowly and eventually build up to 10 hops. Eventually those hops will become stronger and more controlled as you are able to take your hips incrementally higher while keeping your feet low. Equal parts strength and release. Take that mantra to the mat and, when you are trying with all your force, remember that you also have to let go.

Come into straddle Handstand. There’s a lot to think about and you do not necessarily have a lot of time or space to think when upside down, so concentrate on, gaze between the thumbs (not too far forward), pushing the floor away with power, keeping the tailbone slightly tucked, control at the hip crease and keeping the feet low so you do not lose control and fall out backward. Keep pressing the mat away from you by externally rotating your upper arm bones and pulling your biceps toward one another. Utilize the power of your fingertips by micro managing your balance and breaks. Find space and lock in the abdomen by engaging the inner thighs to the pelvic floor, locking the belly button back to the spine and suctioning the belly contents back and up behind the rib cage (uddiyana bandha). Keep control at your hip creases by imagining a band that lets your thighs move only so far away from your belly.

Breathe: Inhale to rise and slow exhale to maintain control at the top or slow lower.

Transition: You’re going to reverse the sequence by coming back to a standing forward bend. Then pivot on the ball of your left foot and heel of your right foot as you come back into Cow Face Pose with a twist to the right, followed by Bird Dog on the same side as earlier, then Bird Dog Plank, repeating Bird Dog, and ending in Seated Twist toward the right. Think of it as unwinding.

Repeat this sequence 3-5 times on each side and then take a kneeling position and close your eyes. Let all that sink in and settle before continuing with your cool down. Your body is silently creating pathways and connecting dots. The body’s intelligence is activating your muscle memory. Use the power of imagery to run through the sequence in your mind.

And then take it back to the mat another day and run through it physically again, smoothing out the edges and creating a more seamless flow guided by your breath.

Suggested Cool Down

About Our Contributor

Holly Fiske is the mother of two, a registered Yoga Medicine Therapeutic Specialist, and a 500 RYT yoga teacher. She is also the author of The Book of Handstand and an eco and ethical clothing designer and yoga and movement teacher. She is a Yoga Alliance-certified advanced teacher through Yoga Medicine with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and Sports Management from Washington State University. You can connect with Holly online, at traveling workshops and during her Yogadventure Retreats. Holly shares her passion for motherhood, adventures and movement with her Instagram audience as @upsidedownmama.