So let me guess, you're working on your backhand spring and you have a common mistake that most athletes make. I.e., your hand spring ends up looking like a push-up. In this video, we had an athlete send us their backhand spring and we're asking, how can I clean this up and working on it for a long time? And I can't seem to get that snap down. You know, hit that power, that speed. In this video, we're going to show you exactly why that problem happens and we're going to show you exactly what you need to do to fix it. So stick with us. Let's take a look at this athletes backhand spring and let me know in the comments below if you've had hand springs that look just like this. So as we can see, this is one of the more common things that we see that athletes struggle with in their hand spring as they don't have that ability to snap down. So I've talked about this in the past. The most common reason why that happens in my opinion is athletes get stronger in their chest faster than they get stronger in their shoulders. A lot of times when we're doing our conditioning, we end up doing a lot of push-ups or we don't work a lot of handstands outside of just our class. And so what happens is athletes become heck dominant or that push-up position dominant and when they're doing their hand spring in kind of a way that's not, you know, we're not familiar fully or we're not fully comfortable with that skill, we will revert back to the things that we're most comfortable with or that we're strongest with. And in most cases, that's going to be our push-ups. So to correct this, we want to start working on shoulder strength and being comfortable in that inverted position. So in this video, we're going to show you guys some really fun ways that you can work on increasing shoulder strength so that that inverted position feels a lot more comfortable. And then additionally, we're going to work on some of the other mechanical things that we typically teach in the backhand spring to make sure that those are also where they need to be to make sure that the end of our hand spring is as powerful and as aesthetically pleasing as it can be. Now the first recommendation that I make for all athletes that are working on a hand spring is to spend three minutes a day in a handstand. And that sounds excessive, but it really isn't that much time and it is a huge way to build confidence and strength in the shoulders. Now this can be done in a few different ways. If you're brand new and you're learning, you know, from the beginning, simply kicking up into a handstand against the wall is a fantastic way to start to get comfortable upside down. Now you don't have to spend all three minutes at once, you can kick up and come down as needed, but we want to accumulate three total minutes. Now if you are at home, you don't want to kick up against the wall because you're afraid your parents are going to let you have somebody hold your feet and ankles and help to support you. Again, the goal here is just to spend time upside down. As we get more comfortable with this, we can work on things like pike presses, we can work on things like handstand pushups, work on things like handstand walking, and we can also make things fun as we get stronger with things like a handstand obstacle course where we set up things along the way where we're either going around them or going up and over them. But just spending three total minutes a day in a handstand is a huge, huge, huge way to build shoulder strength and coordination when we're upside down. Now once we have established some better shoulder strength and better shoulder coordination, we do want to work on being able to transition that coordination and that power into the end of our handspring. And so once we've gotten through some of our handstand variations, we can work on first of all our blocking drills or pop-ups. So there's going to fall into that handstand work where we're getting comfortable with bouncing on our hands. So the pop-hop or the block drill is very, very important. And additionally, our snap down drill is also very important. That gives us the ability to transition from the inverted to the upright position without flopping. And this is something that most athletes should spend some time working on. So for a pop-hop, we would block through the arms, making sure to keep the arms locked out overhead. Again, shrugging through the shoulders, it's not an arm bend, it's a bouncing drill with the arms extended. And then lastly for our snap down, the easiest way to start working on snap down is once we kick up into the handstand, squeezing through the core and driving the feet down. Now most people are probably thinking like, duh, these are easy, kind of elementary, low-level drills that most people know and I completely agree with you. So in order to start to help coordinate that core control of hollow body and snapping, we can actually do a drill that we use for pull-ups and that is our hollow and kip position on the pull-up bar. To do this, you would grab a pull-up bar of some sort or something that you can hang from and you're going to work on opening through the core and then closing back through the core. And again opening through the core and closing back through the core. Some gyms have what are called stall bars where they have that wooden ladder that's mounted against the wall. This is a fantastic tool to have in your gym if you don't have one because it can help to reinforce this opening and closing of the core. If you have a pull-up bar that you can utilize, that's also great. And so for that, you would hang from the pull-up bar. Your feet are going to stay together and we're going to start in a hollow position. Driving the core down, bringing the feet forward and again staying nice and straight. From there, we would open back up, keep the legs together, allow the hips to drive forward and then again close back down. Going from that hollow to that arch position back and forth. This will help to coordinate full body opening and closing from all the way up into the lats down into the legs and will help to coordinate that snap down so that it is more powerful. Now by taking all of these things that we have, building strength in the shoulders, working on our snapping and popping drills and also helping with our coordination of our core, these three things can dramatically change the appearance of our handspring and give our athlete more confidence and confidence in the skill. Hey guys, if you like this video, give me a thumbs up and leave your comments below. Let me know your thoughts. Are you working on a back handspring too? I would love to know if you feel like these can help you. If you'd like more videos on back handsprings, click the link above and if you haven't already, subscribe to the channel, click my face, hit the subscribe button and then hit that bell so you know when we come up with new videos, like new handspring videos. And if you have a video that you want us to do a game film on, leave your comments below, send us a message and you may be on our next game film video. Hopefully so. We'll catch you in the next one.