Handstands are found in floor routines, beam routines, and both mens and womens bar routines. The handstand, one of the basic moves of gymnastics is a fun and relatively easy move to learn in its basic form. Heres a fun link for "how to" instructions. Also below was a pretty good video on how to learn a handstand. It is challenging however to learn how to hold a handstand for long periods of time, and to learn to walk on your hands. Trust me I've fallen over many of times attempting to!
One of the reasons it is a difficult position to maintain is because there is a small base of support and a high center of gravity as well as requiring some arm and shoulder strength. When in the handstand the center of gravity should be centered over the fingers. Doing this makes the handstand slightly over balanced, and equilibrium is achieved by the downward pressure exerted by the body as well as the overall body position.
Another important part of this trick is when your upside down to pretend like you're a puppet and that there are strings pulling your body straight up from your fingertips to your toes.
Bending your legs can help lower the center of gravity but tends to cause other issues with the body position making it more harder to hold.
2 comments:
A nice post! I like the links to the video and how-to, followed by the explanation of the difficulty.
You might think about connecting this more explicitly to science in the future (I could see using this to demonstrate "center of gravity" more explicitly, or even fulcrums and things like that. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for doing a handstand post! This is very helpful to me, though I can't promise I won't hurt myself trying. My brother is wondering why all the furniture is being moved in the living room...
As far as incorporating more physics, I think it would be more helpful to talk more about what each part of the body is doing. Identify the center of gravity of the body and then tell us how you are moving it to adjust your balance. Also explain how the movement of the legs and such can be used to control your balance. These are all physics problems like Jen pointed out and they would greatly help my intellectual approach to this hand stand hobby of mine. If you get really ambitious, maybe even a free body diagram is in order! Haha, sorry to take you back to memories of physics 1...
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