Assassin Blog

Intro

Handstand push-ups are a complex gymnastic movement and the first in this series where you have to go upside down. We will try to help break down the movement and get you able to do it in some fairly straightforward steps.

Setup 

Hand And Head Placement In The Setup

You should visualise your 3 points of contact, form a triangle, hands just slightly wider than shoulder width, elbows facing away from the wall

Kicking Up
To get into the starting position you want to set your hands on the mat/floor and kick your feet up to the wall, finishing with arms and legs fully locked out, glues and core engaged, and only your feet contacting the wall

Dip and Drive

Dip
Full glute and core engagement, tight body from hands to feet, controlled decent until your head touches the floor/mat, your head and hands should form a triangle. If your head and hands are inline you should look to adjust your position to form a triangle as it formas a much stronger and more stable base.

Crunch

At the base of the movement with your head on the floor/mat, contract your core, bringing your knees down towards your chest with your lower back/glues contacting the wall

Drive and Extend

From your crunched position now look to explode the legs directly upwards, as your legs reach full extension drive hard with your arms to reach full extension, arms, glues, core engaged with just feet touching the wall

Recovery

From the top of the movement bring your legs down opposite to the setup phase, controlling yourself and landing on your feet

Common Mistakes

In addition to the common mistakes that we went through for the kipping pull-ups there are a few more with the muscle up that we will walk you through.

Hand Position

It is very common for people to make a mistake with hand position and head position, most common is anding up with your hands and head in line. With your heads and hands in line you are in a biomechanically weaker position to drive up from.

To fix this you should just keep drilling the correct position, keep testing and correcting your position

Lacking Enthusiasm During The Drive Phase

By “Lacking Enthusiasm During the Drive Phase” we mean, not aggressively extending your legs in the drive phase. In the drive phase you use your leg drive to reduce the load on your shoulders and arms to push and extend. If you don’t make the most of an aggressive drive then your shoulders and arms will have to do more work.

To ensure this isnt the case with your movement, take a split second to think about the drive on each rep, really aggressively extending each time

More than just Feet Touching The Wall

Many people have numerous parts of their body touchin the wall when they are driving up through the movement, this gives a feeling of safety as you are heavily overbalanced and supported by the wall, but it also means more effort is needed to drive up through the movement and also usually means the drive phase isnt directly upwards but more diagonally into the wall, further reducing the efficiency.

Another reason can be linked to hand and head position, if you set up too far from the wall you will always be on more of an angle, rather than straight up and down, this narurally puts more pressure against the wall and causes the same issues.

For a number of people, as their confidence grows with the movement they will need to reply on the wall less or you can purposely think about your contact points when you are doing the movement.

If it is due to a simple hand placement issue, a simple hand correction should fix it.

Dropping Too Fast

Dropping too fast is a common error, it seems obvious to let yourself drop in the down phase, it requires less effort and its faster but by losing tension it makes the drive phase and balancing harder, in edition to limiting your control. Also landing heavily on your neck is a very bad move and will greatly increase the chance of injury.

Simply to fix this you should control your decent, it doesn't have to be overly slow, just controlled

Workout

5 RFT - 10 HSPU, 5 Burpees

Good luck and let us know how you get on!