Perfecting your Grip and Alignment in Your Handstand Practice

Handstand is one of the most popular practices in the world of movement. For many movers today, handstand practice is an important part of their regular training. Performing a handstand is only the fundamentals of inversion. Further progression includes straddle handstands, tuck balances and single arm handstand.

There are many ways to learn how to perform a handstand and every practitioner may teach you in a slightly different way. At the end of the day, they will all tell you that having a strong grip and perfect alignment is the foundation to a perfect handstand. This is where Erthe Life’s Handstand Mat comes in. Made with only sustainable materials, the handstand mat is professionally designed and inspired by professional handstand practitioners.

Above: Practice handstand with the ultimate grip where ever you go 

Here are 3 tips to improve your handstand practice:

1. Hand placement

For beginners, the best hand placement to start your practice is shoulder-width apart. The wider your hand placement is, the harder it will be as there will be more pressure on your shoulder muscles. Having a closer hand placement will require stronger shoulder mobility instead. Therefore, starting your practice with shoulder-width apart is recommended.

Whether you’re just starting your practice or you’re a professional, Erthe Life’s Handstand mat has simple and precise alignment lines to help you with your hand placement. These lines are helpful as they make it easy for you to place and adjust your hand placement while inverted.

Above: Erthe Life's Shady Blue Eco-Friendly Handstand Mat

2. Hand Rotation

If you already have some experience with practicing handstand, you may know that your hands can turn inwards or outwards while inverted. The best position is to have the index fingers pointing forward. Beginners often have their fingers turned to different direction due to weak mobility in the wrists or shoulders.

Erthe Life’s Handstand Mat alignment system will help with your fingers' alignment. If you find it hard to have your index fingers pointing forward during a handstand, this is an indication that you need to work on some wrist strengthening and shoulder rotation exercises.

3. Maximum Grip

Having the right stability during a handstand is down to having a precise grip. Beginning your handstand journey can be tough, as we hardly ever use only our hands to support our body in our daily lives, so we are not naturally trained to have good hand and arm strength. Therefore, having a good grip is important.

Erthe Life’s Handstand mat creates a perfect grip allowing you to practice handstand anywhere on all kinds of surfaces. Whether it is on concrete, rough/slippery tiles or any you feel you need that extra grip or cushion for your hands while being upside down, our handstand mat is super lightweight, rolls up easily and can be conveniently carried around where ever you go. The additional grip the handstand mat provides will benefit your practice with extra stability and mobility in all kinds of handstand training.

Above: 4 amazing colours to choose from! Click here to see all colours

We created our handstand mats with 4 amazing vivid colours with each colour embedded with our minimalistic and precise alignment system to perfect your handstand. All handstand mats are made with premium non-slip sustainable natural rubber topped with a professionally engineered eco-polyurethane for maximum grip.

Hand placement, hand rotation and maximum grip are the three main pointers to starting your handstand journey. Focusing on these aspects will provide you the fundamentals in perfecting your handstand. To start your practice, remember to check out 4 vibrant coloured handstand mats in our Handstand Collection for more information and product details.