Pincha (Forearm Stand) Tips to Balance Like an Instagram Yogi
3 Ways to Get into a Wall-Supported Forearm Stand (Pincha Pose)
Exhibit A: use of a forearm stand on Instagram to get some sweet sweet likes
Being able to hurl your entire bodyweight over your shoulders/forearms in a forearm stand is a formidable task to begin with, let alone try to balance yourself in that position!
Thankfully once you learn to properly engage your muscles (and stop being a darn wet noodle), finding - and holding - your balance becomes much more achievable!
With practice, you too can be busting out fancy forearm stand balances like an Instagram yogi influencer (#yogisofinstagram).
Big Tip #1: Squeeze All The Things! (Aka Engage the Supporting Muscles)
Learning to properly engage your muscles is a critical component of any kind of balance practice (headstands, forearm stands, handstands, etc.). This is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT THING (so if you’re aimlessly scrolling through this is the section you should stop and actually read).
Imaging trying to balance a single piece of spaghetti on your palm (which, fun fact: a singular spaghetti noodle is called a spaghetto). Would you rather balance a stiff, dry spaghetti noodle, or a cooked, limp spaghetti noodle? Dry, right?! We want to take that same approach to keeping our body as stiff (as in “engaged,” not necessarily “inflexible”) as we can when trying to balance.
Let’s take a bottom-up approach to looking at what should be engaging in a forearm stand (spoiler alert: you should be squeezing a lot of things). For the sake of this blog post, we’ll be looking at a flat back forearm stand as an example.
Forearms & Palms
To understand how we want to press into our forearms and palms, it helps to understand where we want to be trying to “push” our center of gravity to balance.
When we’re balancing in a forearm stand, we want our balance point to be somewhere between our elbows, and halfway up our forearms. Too close to our elbows and we fall backwards, too close to our palms and we fall forwards.
That means we have to be leaning our weight slightly forwards towards our hands (to not fall out towards our elbows), while at the same time actively pressing into our palms to send the weight backwards to our ideal balance point.
If you ever find your palms or wrists starting to lift off the floor - that’s a sign you’re leaning your weight too far backwards (towards your elbows) and you no longer have the ability to use your nice long forearms to balance! While you can technically balance just on your elbows, it is pretty damn hard (and technically that becomes an elbow stand and not a forearm stand).
Shoulders
When talking about muscle engagement in a forearm balance, proper shoulder engagement is arguably the most important. In our forearm stand, regardless of whether you’re doing a flat-back (basically vertical) pincha, or a more backbend-y (chest dropping, shoulders closing) shape, the two most important cues are:
Push your elbows into the ground (this could mean shoulder protraction or elevation depending on the angle of your torso)
Try to rotate your biceps away from your midline (external shoulder rotation)
Both of these cues help move our scapula (shoulder blades) to the best position to support our forearm stand (and if you’re adding a backbend, gives your upper back more room to bend!). They also engage our shoulder girdle to help steady our shoulder joint, making that connection between our upper arm and torso less “noodle-y” (noodle joints are not very helpful when trying to balance!)
Related Blog Post: The Importance of “External Shoulder Rotation” in a Backbend
Core
As we continue our body scan up (or down?) our body, we get to our core. For our torso and core you want to think of:
“knitting” your ribs together, as if trying to bring them in to touch (what we want to avoid is letting them flare out to the sides too much)
engaging our “transverse abdominus” (your “meat corset” muscles!) by sucking your belly in as if you were trying to put on a pair of pants 1 size too small
Hips & Legs
In my experience, it’s the hips that can be one of the “laziest” parts of our forearm balances (or any inverted balance for that matter - looking at you handstand folks!) because we often spend so much time thinking about what our hands/arms are doing on the floor we don’t even have time to think about our legs before we fall out of a balance.
For our hips and our legs, we basically want to engage them thoroughly so they don’t move. Remember our spaghetto analogy, even if your shoulders and torso are super solid, if your hips and legs are a soft spaghetto balance will elude you!
For our lower body, we want to:
squeeze your glutes to push your hips forwards (the front of your hips shoulder be flat, not piked)
engage your quads to actively keep your legs kicked straight
engage your inner thighs to squeeze your legs together - giving yourself a yoga block to squeeze can be a helpful training support!
point your toes and reach them to the ceiling because a) it looks nice and b) this helps us mentally keep the “energy” of our balance reaching straight up to the ceiling (if you struggle with engaging your shoulders, sometimes thinking about reaching your toes as high as you can can help!)
Big Tip #2: Use a Wall!
So we just learned you’re supposed to SQUEEZE ALL THE THINGS, but how the heck can you focus on all of those at once?
You can’t. That’s where using a wall can be an invaluable tool! By practicing with your feet on a wall for balance, you can buy yourself time to run through an entire body scan to make sure you’re properly engaging your muscles before trying to balance on your own.
Even if you aren’t actively trying to balance, you can focus on the “proper” engagement body part by body part to start to “teach” your body the correct form. Over time, these engagements will become naturally and you won’t have to consciously check in to confirm that you are doing each and every one!
This video is an example of one of my favorite ways to try to practice my flat-back full body balance engagement (that particular video is shown in a handstand, but you can totally do it in your forearm stand!). You keep your toes on the wall while you find your flat back balance stack, engaging everything up until your knees, than you straighten one leg, then the other to complete your engaged balance.
Big Tip #3: Film Yourself
I film myself all. the. time. And not just because I make a bunch of Insta and YouTube posts - filming myself is how I get my progress pics (they’re just video screenshots) and check my form. Especially when it comes to balancing practice, it can be hard to watch yourself in real-time in a mirror (not only is it hard to balance when spotting a wobbly object like your body, but it usually requires you to do something funky and counterproductive to your neck).
Filming yourself and watching the recording is a great way to “see” the effect of your muscle engagements in action, and to spot when/where your balance fails so you can start to learn where your form is weakest. Because forearm balances are so dependent on shoulder engagement, it can be even more beneficial to film yourself in an outfit where you can see your shoulder blades (ex. tank top or shirtless).
Things you can usually see in a video (and learn from!) are:
Where in the world are your shoulder blades? Can you see them wrapping towards the sides of your ribs?
Are your shoulders (correctly) shrugging up towards your ears? Check to see if your deltoids (the “teardrop” shaped muscle on the top of your shoulder) are at ear height
Is your back arching (and is it supposed to be)? Depending on the type of balance you’re working on, you may or may not want your back to arch
Are your hips piked (and are they supposed to be)? Again, this may depend on what shape you’re working on. For a flat-back forearm stand, your hips should be flat. If they are piked/hinged that means you need to squeeze your darn glutes
Put It All Together And What Have You Got?
If you’re properly engaging your muscles, that means you’re pretty much engaging all the way from your fingertips down to your toes (literally!). Thankfully you can use a wall to practice almost all of that engagement without having to perfectly balance, and you can film yourself to double check your form.
And this same general concept or engagement and training applies to other backbendier variations of forearm stands (and handstands!) as well - even if they may look incredibly flexible, there is still a buttload of engagement that needs to be going on to balance with control.
