Improving back handsprings, part 2

This article was actually written and published in February 2024, before my April version of Improving Back Handspring Technique. For some reason, it got lost in the WordPress ether and I had to do a lengthy archive search process to find it again. When I read it through, there was even more useful information than what I had published in April, so I am offering this as part two.

I was at the gym one Sunday morning in January and was warming up with some of fundamentals before class with Tammy, my friend and coaching partner. We’ve been flipping together for many years and we like to take some time before class starts to work on the stuff we need to focus on before teaching class.

One of the things I’ve been particularly fixated on is my back handspring on the trampoline. For those of you who don’t know what that is, here’s a description:

• Stand at one end of the tramp
• Bend your knees
• Push off your feet and launch your body at a 45 degree angle with arms extended overhead
• Bound through a handstand position
• Snap back to your feet at the other end of the trampoline

There are videos below. It’s weird to explain, since the whole move takes literally three seconds to complete. But in those three seconds, you have to have so many things in place to be successful. If one of those things are “off,” you travel diagonally, you undercut it, you tweak your shoulder, you land on your knees…and so on.

Working the fundamentals

I started my gymnastics endeavors late; at 36, I stepped foot into my first adult class and I haven’t stopped learning since.

To learn more about how my Geriatric Gymnast journey started, read I am a gymnastics addict. 

Gymnastics has proven, time and time again, to be a great blueprint for living your life. That’s why I have kept it up well into my middle-age, through injuries and setbacks. The work doesn’t get any easier with the challenges that the aging body provides, but the physical, emotional and cognitive boosts the training offers are stellar. It gives you an opportunity to learn in so many different ways, so you can access knowledge through problem solving. It’s the kind of stuff that fights dementia later on in life.

This study from the National LIbrary of Medicine talks about how exercise, particularly open-skill exercise activities (ones performed in dynamic, externally paced, and more unpredictable environments), can reduce the risk factors associated with cognitive decline and dementia. You can do your own deep dive into the science behind the activity-brain boost connection.

That mindset has certainly helped my own practice, as well as my ability to coach other adults. We “big kids” have more fear, but we also have the capacity to understand the logic of how physics works. When we understand things from the inside out, we actually have a shot at training smarter to get to our eventual goals. As I come to new and stronger, more sensible understandings, I can pass that along to the people I coach.

The back handspring

The back handspring is one of those fundamental skills that every gymnast strives to perfect. It is used in most every tumbling pass you see on the floor. I don’t dare take handsprings to the floor; with my wonky rotator cuffs, one bad angle creates a world of pain, suffering and major inconvenience in my regular life. Instead, I train them on the trampoline to improve my form and strengthen my shoulders in motion.

I was about three years into my gymnastics escapades. The back handspring was a newer achievement for me, and once I got out of the belt (the support apparatus that helps you work a skill without crashing if you mess up), I was super excited that my adult self could throw them in such quick succession.

Over the years, my handsprings have cycled through many different incarnations. As you age and your body changes, you have to make adjustments. For example, my back and shoulders have never been super mobile, so for anything going backwards, I have had to compensate with power and speed. Ten years ago, my back handspring was super snappy. Now, between my fast twitch muscles being less accessible, and my back and shoulders being even less flexible, I’m much slower now, which has compromised my form over time.

As I have learned the hard way, bad shoulder mobility can create big problems. Thus, I needed to figure out what adjustments I’d have to make to stay aligned and healthy.

Change your focus, change your trajectory.

As part of my quest for improvement, I’ve been working on three major strategies to make lasting, positive changes to my technique:

1. Shoulder mobility and stability: maintaining proper shoulder alignment when my arms are overhead
2. Eye focus: Knowing where to look to start and end the move on track
3. Squeezing the center: Keeping the arms and legs pulled together and centered at all times

It’s no secret that as we age, we lose mobility over time. When we spend our time and energy conditioning, we can stay ahead of that we think is the inevitable physical backslide. We also tend to take certain things for granted, often thinking, I have the skill, I don’t need to go back to basics! This couldn’t be further from the truth, because that mindset leads to areas of weakness, instability, and ultimately, injury. Best to revisit the fundamentals once in a while, just to make sure you’re not inviting trouble.

I’ll go into more depth to explain each strategy.

Strategy #1: Shoulder mobility and stability

With older, tighter shoulders that don’t like to go into full overhead flexion easily, I have to work a lot on shoulder and scapular mobility. I’ve had rotator cuff injuries in both shoulders and I’ll say that I do not like them at all. Bursitis, SLAP tears, bone spurring: they all cause pain and limit mobility which is bad for anything functional and it’s even worse for gymnastics. So, it is in my best interest to train smarter, not harder.

As a result of all the injuries and resultant PT visits, I’ve become hyperaware of my shoulder and scapular positioning, strength and flexibility. I always warm them up amply before going into any kind of inversion work and do mobility exercises regularly to keep the area strong and stable.

When training back handsprings, I’ve always done them from a still, standing position; basically, you stand tall with arms overhead, swing them down and back into extension, then snap them back overhead as you push through the toes (see the video above).

The problem with that method is that if your shoulder mobility is not great and you don’t get the arms all the way back to your ears before you launch, you compromise your form and can cause big issues with the whole rotator cuff. I’ve seen the undercutting from poor shoulder extension in other people and when I see it in my own technique, I cringe.

Change comes hard

Of course, being a creature of habit, I was afraid to try back handsprings any other way but with the arm swing. I had seen other adults throwing them from a standing position (no arm swing) and from a rebound (bouncing into it) and my brain told me that was too crazy and chaotic to even consider. I couldn’t make it all make sense, and if I can’t wrap my brain around a concept, I avoid it like the plague. I don’t need to invite the trouble of pain into my world. I’ve been there, done that, and would like to avoid it at all costs.

 "When Injuries Attack"  documents one of my many dealings with shoulder and back injury over the years.

Learning how to do a boundering back handspring

During one practice while I was working on handsprings, Tammy suggested I try the boundering version. Basically, you jump three times, and on the last one, your feet advance in front of your hips and your rebound backwards. She showed me how to do it, and explained that it was actually better for my shoulders since the arms would already be set in place on the launch. This would be a more stable position for the shoulder girdle.

I felt the familiar flutter in my chest, but the concept made sense: on the rebound, your feet are slightly ahead of your hips, putting you at the proper angle for the launch backwards. Even so, changing my normal patterns when I am not 100% confident about the technique has sometimes resulted in poor, injury-laden results.

In the belt

Sometimes, even though you know your body is completely capable of something, your brain has to catch up. After a few turns in the belt, I started to understand what I needed to do and my brain started to relax.

Going solo

Part of the learning process when trying to create a new habit in gymnastics is managing a “kiss it up to god” moment. It’s not about being reckless, rather it’s taking what you already know and applying something new to change the outcome. At the gym, I experience a lot of these moments as I try new things to gain new skills, so I have learned to distinguish actual fear from the performance anxiety related to novel things.

Strategy #2: Eye Focus

Part of the secret of flipping successfully is knowing where you are at all times. Flipping your body requires lots of kinesthetic awareness, and the way to orient yourself is to train your eyes to track where you want to go. It takes a long time to develop, but once you train your flipping eyes, it seems to slow things down a bit. It’s like a baseball player trying to read the movement of a pitch. They’ve seen so many pitches coming to them that they’ve developed a sports vision. I think it’s the same idea for gymnastics.

The starting focus for back handsprings is really important, because it dictates on what pathway you will travel. One of the issues I’ve always had is that my back handsprings tend to go on an angle. Instead of tracking along the center line of the trampoline, I wind up closer to the right back corner.

For a long time, I thought I was pushing one foot harder or one shoulder was leading too much. I recently discovered that my eye focus might have been the culprit. I’d focus on one obvious (and large) spot that was on the far wall in front of me. Turns out, that spot was not exactly centered squarely on the trampoline. It was actually slightly off to the left, which explained my shift to the right. I was actually going straight, just not aligned with the center line of the tramp.

Once I shifted my focus, and didn’t change anything else about my technique, I went straight down the middle. That was a derp moment. All this time, I was misdiagnosing the problem. Sigh…

Strategy #3: Squeeze the center

Alignment is everything. One thing I’m always telling others (and myself) is to try to pull the thumbs together over head and keep the feet together at all times. It’s so hard, because a wider base (feet apart) feels so much more stable a starting place. Problem is, when the shoulders are wide, you risk an injury. When your feet are wide, you’re spreading your energy in the wrong direction. Keeping it all close to the center axis of your body improves the efficiency of the execution. It’s prettier too.

Remember: old habits die hard

Making changes to long-established habits is so difficult, which is why regular practice and many, many mindful repetitions are important. We must have patience and grace with ourselves to stick with it for the long game.

Putting it all together

This is my form checklist for the standing back handspring. If you are using the arm swing, you have to make sure your arms make it back to their starting place before you punch your feet to launch.

1. Feet together: Inner leg seam should squeeze together.
2. Arms up: Elbows straight (engage triceps), thumbs point towards each other, squeeze your head with your biceps.
3. Look straight ahead: Keep your neck aligned with the spine, even when inverted.
4. Lean back: Like you’re sitting in a chair, hips go back as you punch the feet into the trampoline.
5. Tuck the chin: Keep the neck in alignment with the rest of the spine. Don’t look back.
6. See the back wall: As you go through the handstand inversion, put your eyes on the wall behind you.
7. Push off the finger pads, pop the shoulders up to your ears, hollow body.
8. Snap down to your feet: Look for the same focal point you saw when you started.
9. Rebound: Punch the trampoline with your feet and reach those arms to the ceiling.

It’s a lot, I know. But it’s important that all of those things happen in three seconds. That’s why good back handspring technique is so so so hard. If you are working on it, I hope this article has given you some good things to think about!

If you’re looking for a more in-depth tutorial back handspring technique, click the link below, where I offer some detailed advice on all the things I’ve covered in this article.

Stacey Tirro is an arts educator, a high school physical education teacher, a mom and wife, a singer, and an author/podcaster, and a coach at Flipper’s Gymnastics in Ramsey, New Jersey. She loves creating content of her Geriatric Gymnastics escapades, which you can find on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.