Difficulty: Hard

Safety Warning: Work within your own limits, and always use a partner to spot you where necessary. Make sure your surroundings are safe and secure. Warm up thoroughly before trying any of these moves!

In Handstand Conditioning 2, Rowan takes you through some more exercises for strengthening and improving your handstand technique. For handstands, it’s really important to condition and warm up your wrists, back, neck, shoulders and core.

First, Rowan demonstrates a tuck to handstand. Use the entire length of your leg to straighten out and bring your hips above your shoulders. This helps with your alignment of shoulders and hips. If you find this easy, variations on this are a straddle up and pike up which will also help with your alignment.

Next, Rowan shows us a handstand line exercise, working with a partner to keep your legs in as tight a line as possible while your partner tries to move you.

Another great exercise is an endurance handstand, holding for a certain amount of time against a wall – or freestanding, if you are comfortable with that.

You can work towards doing handstands on a raised platform. Remember to start low and work your way up.

Another partner drill is to work on press/elephant lifts with a partner. The most important part of this is to get your hips up over your shoulders before you lift your toes.

Finally, Rowan shows us shape transitions – going in and out of tucks and straddles into a straight handstand.

Use Handstand Conditioning 1 and Handstand Conditioning 2 to really perfect your handstands!

You can see all our videos and activities here.