Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/26/gymnast-does-342-handstand-presses-in-about-52-minutes.html
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The fine muscle control for the balancing handstand was unreal.
I was cringing the whole time, even though I was pretty sure the face plant was not coming.
If there are outtake videos for that one, I do not want to see them.
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Not to take anything away from her achievement (because it is an impressive effort) but to let you in on a little secret, many moves in gymnastics are much easier to do than they appear.
The trick for these types of handstand presses is the flexibility in her legs and hip flexors for the ability to do wide center splits. The further apart your legs are and the tighter you can curl at your hips and pelvis, the lower your center of mass. If you look closely, the center of mass is right about at her belly button and by leaning forward into her shoulders and rotating her pelvis, she is actually pivoting at much lower center or gravity and therefore making the press motion easier than taking on the full weight of her legs. Really the part that tires out the quickest is your forearms and wrists.
It makes this move and many like them more reliant on balance and flexibility than strength. As a former gymnast and coach myself, I used to teach how the placement of various body parts in relationship to balance is really the key to pulling off certain moves. Flexibility beats strength in gymnastics any day of the week.
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#243 was particularly well executed, along with #97 and #126.
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As someone who did gymnastics as a pre-teen/teen, I’m just going to say “wow”.
Regardless of flexibility and control aspects, you’re basically lifting your entire body weight with a handstand press. We used to have to do these in sets of 10, and I was always dying by the end. I was never a super high achieving gymnast, but wasn’t super weak either.
This is impressive.
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Astonishing 
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Kinda random observation, but watching that first icewater yoga video I couldn’t help notice the guy consistently saying ‘handstand’. It’s a very conspicuous use of the ‘singular’ form of a noun, where the general usage is practically always plural. Reminds me of some fashion folks who will say to pair a blouse with a good ‘pant.’ There’s plenty of examples of words that act as a kind of signifier of subject matter expertise, but these two strike me as funny since they use a familiar word but in a slightly altered way.
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Well, just supporting you bodyweight on your arms and hands for 52 minutes is something 99.99% of the population couldn’t dream of, so any way you look at it it is impressive.
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She broke the record again a month later… 402
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I could, maybe, manage 0.52 seconds.
don’t people say “I can do a handstand” ? like “I can do a headstand”
He does say “To me, handstand is…” when normally i think people would say “doing a handstand is fun” or “doing handstands is fun”
I think it’s just rare to hear the word/concept on its own without a helper verb
ok: he does say “you can do handstand” which is really weird.
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