How to Do a Back Handspring

Video Transcript

"Alright now we're going to be talking about actually doing the back handspring today. When you learn your back handsprings, you always want to practice with a spotter. A certified coach, gymnast, somebody certified in actually teaching and training. We're going to go ahead and practice down on a wedge right now or a "cheese mat". What you're going to do, is you're going to do the same thing that you were doing up against the wall, you're going to just reach up and just sit down and reach. And it's going to be the same motion when we get up to the top of the wedge, we're going to be standing up , reaching, sitting down back and jumping back to a handstand. The handstand position is really important in the back handspring because if we don't get that tight tight body position, the landing is going to be a little bit off. So we want to make sure we really exaggerate hitting that handstand and snapping down to our toes. So, I'll demonstrate. Reach up, sit back in our chair, jump to a handstand and on our toes. We're not going to worry about so much pushing onto our feet, we're just going to worry about hitting that handstand. Again. Alright now, as far hitting that handstand position, I'm going to show you what I didn't want to see in a back handspring and that's what we call "frog handsprings" or "frog springs". That's when you start bending your knees and getting your elbows out here like this. A lot of people for beginning back handsprings, it's okay, but it's going to happen like this. So, like I said, we really want to exaggerate that handstand position. Now that we've got that handstand position down, we're going to go ahead and start pushing in our shoulders like we're doing in a round off. With our hands here, we're going to push in our shoulders off the ground and land on our feet. So, I'll demonstrate here. We're going to really really exaggerate pushing in our shoulders here. As you notice, my arms are staying up by my ears at all times. I'll try that again. Alright, so now we've got our back handsprings down on the wedge pretty good, we're going to start taking it to the floor now, start practicing over here. It's going to be a little bit different. We're not going to have as much automatic lean-back because with that angle, it starts to lean our feet back, so we automatically have a kind of a backward motion going to us. So now we're actually going to have to start leaning back on our heels a lot more on the floor to get that big stretch, same way we were doing on the cheese mat. So, we're going to practice a few here. Make sure we hit that handstand position and not our frog position. Reach back, sit in that chair position and jump. Again, keeping those arms snapping up by your ears every single time."