How To Get More Out Of Your Warm-Ups

Joel instructed me from the other side of the class, “Put weight onto the middle of your hand”.

The warmup drill instantly got hard but exposed a key flaw.

I was in a handstand class. The gymnastics gym is located inside one of the large warehouses in the business complex. With its tall white walls and padded beige floors, the room feels cold and soulless.

As part of the warmup, Joel had me and 11 other people practice our handstand positioning by getting us to place our hips on the edge of the 12-inch blue and red foam-padded boxes with our hands on the floor. We were instructed to then push our hands into the ground and squeeze our core and legs, creating a straight line so our bodies were at a 30-degree angle to the floor with our entire body weight going only through our hands and hips (rest on the box).

I didn’t find this particularly difficult. But Joel noticed all my weight was on the heel of my hand – my fingers and the middle of my hand were barely touching the ground. So instructed me, “On your next rep, put weight onto the middle of your hand”.

So the next round, I made the subtle adjustment. The aim was to hold it for 10 seconds, but after 4 seconds, I had to let my legs fall down onto the box and get my weight off my arms.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realised that was the key piece missing from my handstands.

I was practising doing a handstand against the wall and noticed my weight was mainly on the heel of my hand. To pull my legs off the wall, I had to transfer my weight into the front of my hand. I’d known this for a while, but I always struggled to do it. But after Joel’s instructions, I noticed I had been missing a detail. When I tried to transfer the weight forward, the weight went into my finger and bypassed the middle of my hand (which is much more capable of taking weight).

So I forced my midhand down and instantly noticed my weight came off the walk. But like the previous day’s class, the subtle change put significantly more pressure on my anterior shoulders, which couldn’t hold it long, so I had to bail out of the handstand position.

We often miss small details when we do the warmups. We are usually too busy trying to rush through it to get to the main practice.

But a good warmup should prep the body for the exercise (and not just get blood flowing to the joints). It is usually done at a low-intensity level so we can focus on small details and help expose and fix weaknesses and flaws.

In my case, while in a handstand, the intensity was too high, and there were too many variables for me to notice my hand pressure. Even though in the past, the coach said to me, “Get more pressure in the front of your hand”. But I thought I was, and I had so many other issues with my form, I wasn’t able to give it attention. But even if I did give it more attention, it probably wouldn’t have helped much. I didn’t know what “correct” felt like – the handstand was intensity was too much for me to explore.

But with the warmup, the intensity was low enough for me to explore the correct form. And once I learnt what good felt like, I could then search for it on the handstand, a higher intensity.