Wrist Warm Up for Handstands

Wrist Warm Up for Handstands

Happy wrists = happy handstands

Warming up your wrists should always be a part of your handstand training (or really any training where your hands are bearing body weight, like pole dancing, bodyweight calisthenics, or contortion). Warming up your wrists will not only make your handstands more comfortable and help prevent wrist injuries, but you can include conditioning exercises to strengthen your wrists to make your balances stronger!

Quick disclaimer: as with all flexibility exercises - stretching should never hurt! If any of these hurt your wrists, don’t push through the pain - try to either push less weight into your hands to lighten the load, or skip the exercise.

Wrist Circles (All the Directions)

Wrist circles help get our wrists used to bearing weight at different angles without all of our bodyweight smooshing into them (they’re also one of my favorites for warming up wrists for bridges as well). You want to keep these gentle, so if they feel intense (especially the “palms up” versions), you can lighten the load on your wrists by walking your hands back closer to your knees so you can sit more weight into your legs and less weight into your hands.

Palms Down, Fingers Forwards: 3 circles in each direction

Palms Down, Fingers Inwards (“Bull Dog Arms”): 3 circles in each direction

Palms Down, Fingers Outwards (“Sea Lion Hands”): 3 circles in each direction

Palms Down, Fingers Backwards: 3 circles in each direction

Palms Up, Fingers Backwards: 3 circles in each direction

Palms Up, Fingers Inwards (“Awkward Bull Dog”): 3 circles in each direction

Palms Up, Fingers Inwards (“Awkward Sea Lion”): 3 circles in each direction

Palm and Finger Push Ups (All the Directions)

Now we get into the more “serious” conditioning: palm and finger push ups! These drills directly translate to our forearm, wrist, and finger strength to be able to help us balance our handstands. You want to lean enough weight into your hands that these feel challenging, but not so much that you’re palms are plummeting to the ground on the descent.

Palm Push Ups, Fingers Forwards: x4

Finger Push Ups, Fingers Forwards: x4

Palm Push Ups, Fingers Outwards: x4

Finger Push Ups, Fingers Outwards: x4

Palm Push Ups, Fingers Inwards: x4

Finger Push Ups, Fingers Inwards: x4

Wrist Push Ups (Loose Fist)

Wrist push ups work on our wrist strength/stability in a different direction from what we usually use in our handstands, so they’re a nice compliment to make sure the muscles supporting our wrist joint are strong on both sides!

Option 1: Keep a loose fist (thumb on the outside) as you rotate the tops of your hands to the floor and lean forwards into a kneeling push up. Try to keep the top of your hands on the floor as long as you can when you straighten your arms pushing back up to start. Aim for 5-10 reps.

Option 2 (slightly easier): Open your hands (no fist) so that you have the tops of your hands on the floor, fingers spread out, palms facing up. Bend your elbows to lower your chest towards your hands, then push into the tops of your hands as you straighten your elbows to push up. Aim for 5-10 reps.

Finger Lifts

These ones are the smallest movements, but I find them the hardest, so like to save them for last! This is a great exercise for strengthening our fingers and helps with wrist extension.

Kneeling on all fours, keeping your arms straight and pressing your palms into the floor, try to lift your fingers off of the floor 5-10 times (that’s it!) - it’s harder than it looks! If you can’t lift your fingers, lean your weight backwards slightly until you can just barely lift the fingers, and train in that range of motion. If you want to make this exercise more challenging, lean forwards a tiny bit and see if you can still do your finger lifts with a forward lean. Make sure those arms stay straight!