How to Do a Handstand in Brazilian Capoeira Martial Arts

Video Transcript

"GRADUADO ADVOGADO: Hi, my name is Advogado on behalf of Expert Village. We're going to talk about your basic capoeira handstand. In capoeira, you'll notice there are a lot of cartwheels, handstands, spinning on the hands. There's a lot of movement that requires you to have a little bit of upper-body strength. You do not have to have a lot of upper-body strength to do those movements, but you do have to have is enough upper-body strength to hold yourself up on your hands and for at least for a couple of seconds. Okay, so in most capoeira classes, that's part of the warm-up. You'll see a lot of handstands and what you want to work on, you want to--if you can't do a handstand when you start capoeira, you want to do little handstands, build up, but your long-term goal is you should be able to walk across a room on your hands. And for most people, that usually takes a lot of time, you know, maybe a couple of--up to a couple of years to be able to do that and control that movement. For me, handstands are all about control. Okay? You need to learn to control the movement from the very beginning of the movement until you finish the movement. Okay, a lot of times you'll see people especially when they're starting out learning their handstands, they will do a great handstand. But when they land it, they crash on their knees or they land on their feet really hard on the floor. What they've done is they're learning how to do the movement correctly and then they're kind of giving up at the halfway point and they're just kind of falling out of it however they're able to. And first that's okay but you eventually want to learn how to not do that. You want to teach yourself to do the movement controlled from the beginning to end. Okay, I think this is a good handstand drill to learn handstands and balance. What you want to do is you want to--the first step is do not look at your hands. If you have a mirror that you're training in front of, that's good. You want to look at yourself in the mirror. So if you have a mirror, you want to face away from the mirror so your back is towards the mirror. You're on your feet. You're going to go ahead and go into a handstand position, hands flat on the floor, go ahead and look for yourself in the mirror. What you don't want to do is look at your hands while they're on the floor. You want to make sure you're looking forward because if you're playing capoeira, you want to always see the person that you're playing so you want to make sure you're looking forward on that. Okay, bring your knees and legs together and you're going to go ahead--I like to call it balling up. You're going to make yourself into a smaller ball as you can, and you're going to tuck your knees in towards your chest and hold it. Okay? You want to hold it for two or three seconds, as long as you can, try to find your point of balance. Now when you land, you want to land on one foot at a time and I want you to land as quietly as you can on the floor. Okay, that indicates--if I can see you do that and I know that you're landing quietly on the floor, that indicates to me that you've controlled--you've learned how to control the movement from the very beginning until the very end."