Are short handstand sessions
right for you?
Training handstands for 15 min a day is not for everyone. It takes a special kind of person to love handstand training enough to train consistently. Depending on your overarching goal and lifestyle choices shorter or longer handstand workouts will be right for you.
Limited time & energy available
Doing anything at all is always better than doing nothing. If you do not have a lot of time in your day due to responsibilities, if you are busy with work, family or running errands all day you will be left exhausted. No chance that you will consistently pull yourself together and go to the gym for an hour or two at the end of all that.
Committing yourself to a 15 min practice that you can do practically anywhere is possible any day under any circumstances. Your handstands will improve, you will feel better and this might just be the perfect balance to a busy work week!
Important to notice here is also that not all workouts have to be 15 min. You can also mix longer and shorter workouts throughout your week and train more on days when you have more time available.
Main focus of training in other fields
Many of my clients train handstands but have other goals in mind. The handstand might be something they know would be a great supplementary skill for their main disciplines or it is just something they want to learn because they think it is cool. Either way as long as handstands are not the main goal you do not want to spend most of your time training them. Adding 15 min a day to your routine will allow you to practically pick up the handstand as you go along training what you love.
Deal with frustration and plateaus
Handstand progress can be mean sometimes. Without great guidance you will have workouts and weeks when you make plenty of gains followed by workouts where things seem to be going backwards. It is easy to get frustrated with that and to stick your head in the sand. A great solution here is to take a step back and to let handstands move into a bit of a passive growing state. Take a couple drills that are doable but difficult at the moment. For the next couple weeks you will only invest 15 min into your handstands touching base with those skills. You will see that without even really realizing it at first these skills that were difficult are all of a sudden easy simply because you repeated them often enough that they went deep inside of your body and mind.
You simply do not like handstand training as much
Not everyone has to love handstands. Growing up during gym class I hated them and faked injuries to get out of practice. Yes, the tables have turned for me. Whilst I am convinced you will get addicted as well once you train handstands more in the meantime, forcing yourself to do 15 min handstand sessions might be the perfect solution. You can withstand pretty much anything for 15 min. You know handstands are beneficial for you and will help with your other disciplines. Well, bite the bullet and pull through. Make the hard gains and harvest the rewards later! You deserve to stand out!
Physically not ready
One last reason why you might choose doing very short handstand workouts is because your wrists are not able to take the pressure or because your shoulders get tired and you sink in quickly. Keeping your handstand workouts short might allow you to exclusively do high quality handstand sets with well elevated shoulders keeping risk for additional wrist inflammation and pain to a minimum. If this is you then this can be a very temporary solution but generally I would recommend extending the workout time and actually focus on the reasons that hold you back.
Disadvantages of
shorter handstand sessions
If you are anything like me you will say: “I have heard enough. This is enough.” You close your browser and only train 15min for the rest of your life. Whilst I would love to hear that you are training for the rest of your life I do not want to trick you into believing 15 min turbo workouts are the way to go. There are downsides to short workouts. Some more obvious than others but all vital to know about!
Less rapid progress
To a certain extent getting good at handstands is based on a simple equation. Time spent = results harvested. The more time you spend on your hands the better you will get. The more time you will spend upside down the more your brain will accept being upside down as the new normal.
With shorter workouts of course less time is spent upside down and therefore growth will be slower. If you have to spend x amount of time to learn a freestanding handstand but only spend 15 min per workout it will take a much longer time to spend the required time.
Difficult to train advanced skills
You won’t need too much time to learn the wall or even the freestanding handstand so with 15 min per session these are easily possible but advanced skills need significantly more time. Training short sessions only will make it hard to book the time necessary.
Furthermore the bigger issue with advanced skills is that they will need advanced warm ups and preparation. In handstands in contrast to traditional weight lifting an athlete usually chooses to train the hardest progressions last just before the conditioning training. An advanced handstand athlete will use easier progressions to warm up mind muscle connection and upside down awareness and coordination before attempting advanced skills. 15 min might not be enough to make it to your advanced skills.
Lack of overall volume
A main issue of short workouts is that you only have very few sets available for training but usually we have lots of different goals and we understand working a variety of exercises is essential for handstand growth. One approach when programming more frequent but significantly shorter handstand workouts could and must be to cycle exercises. The idea will be to hit a different skill or progression every day of your workout week to at the end visit everything at least one or possibly two times per week. Whilst this is a great idea realistically this will not work once a certain level is reached as it does not provide enough frequency to get good at advanced skills.
Risk of injuries
Less time spent usually means less warm up and therefore a higher risk for injuries. If you do not take time for your training and rush through things can go wrong. Now a big advantage is that handstand training is generally not exactly dangerous.
As long as a minimum and well calculated amount of time is spent on prehab exercises and warm up one can avoid almost all injuries. Yet, do keep in mind that you will not have enough time to train anything else in these 15 min meaning that your body and physique will not stay balanced.
How to use
15 min effectively
If you think short handstand workouts are the way to go then your workouts need to be well planned, calculated and precise.
Plan your workout on a weekly level
Think big picture. What are the exercises you want to do and how can you divide them throughout the week to fit enough volume per drill into your plan? I usually start by writing a complete, full length workout. Then I chip off warm up, cool down and conditioning being left only with the technical part of the workout.
Now take this technical part and see how you can divide it by 2,3 or 5 to do each part once or twice each week.
Make sure to cycle your prehab as well. The goal of your warm up is not just to prepare you for the upcoming session but also to keep you healthy. These 2-3 prehab sets you get per workout should be structured to assure you hit all stabilizing muscles with at least 2 different exercise variations per week.
Know what you are doing – 0 distraction
When you get to the gym and your timer is set to 15 min it’s game time. You should have your workout memorized, equipment ready and most importantly your phone needs to be put away. 15 min is not that long. Stay fully focused and do not allow yourself to get distracted!
Beat the odds through frequency and consistency
A 15 min workout can and should be done 5-6 times per week. This means you will be on your hands almost every day of the week. This high frequency will give you a huge advantage over other athletes and can potentially even give you an edge over your competition.
15 min to train handstands is not a lot. As long as your workouts are well planned & organized and you know exactly what you are doing you can make gains in as little as 15 min per day. It is important to remember that eventually a lack of volume might drive you into a plateau and you will not have time to work on anything but the one thing you want to focus on. This should not be a permanent way of training and also not your only fitness activity throughout the week but 15 min handstand workouts can be a great temporary option.
