Handstands Week 2 - Shoulder: The Burden

Last post I promised to talk about mobility, so here it is! If downward dogs don't get you down, and you feel confident in your mobility, this probably isn't necessary for you. If you're like me, this is going to be your starting point, whether you want to do a handstand, or just about any other physical endeavor. Primarily: mobility takes time. It takes approximately 3 times longer for connective tissue in joints to recover than your actual muscles. This slow recovery means a lot of things for your training. Firstly, you're gonna wanna get as much of a head start on mobility as possible, because you really can't rush it. The joints need time to recover, and pushing your body more than it's capable of fixing is only going to hurt your gains and put you at risk of injury in the long run. It's a counter-intuitive approach that's eluded me for years. This is going to produce results that come about as fast as turtle shit, aaand if you're anything like myself, this is going to murder your march into mobile magnificence; which is a shame, because it does so many wonderful things for you. Wonderful things like reduced risk of injury, increased physical performance, more efficient training in other areas (maybe the reason you've hit a plateau), and most crucially: reaching the remote without getting off the couch.

New Challenge - Handstands

I'm still alive! I think we can safely say that the last challenge was a failure. FAILURE! It's often an ugly word. Knowing that I started something and didn't finish it was painful, and certainly one of the factors contributing to another year-long absence. I want to get into my head- get into your head for a second! Failure is awesome! It means one of two things: you busted your ass and made progress, or you didn't and you need to shift your focus. For myself, the latter is twofold true. I started with the best intentions on my flair challenge, but things quickly fell apart because I had too much on my plate to meet the lofty goals I set. In retrospect, I also think my challenge was too closely tied to my actual job, and it became a redundancy issue. None of this changes the fact that I crashed and burned, but the only progressive option is to look at that failure objectively and tweak my goals, processes for meeting them, and general failure-based thinking. That reminds me. There's something over there, glistening on the horizon. What's that? It looks like... feet? Wait.. it's...

Handstand!!?!