Wrist Load in Handstands

Wrists are the most common complaint from people learning handstands, and they were mine. In a handstand the wrist is bent back close to its end range while carrying your whole body weight, and it’s also doing the balancing (Balance Is a Control Loop). It’s sensor, actuator and weak link all at once.

What the research says about where the load goes

A 2024 study in Sports Biomechanics (Scigliano and colleagues) had 15 former collegiate gymnasts hold a 45-second handstand on a pressure platform and measured force under four regions of the hand: fingers, metacarpals (knuckles), and the thenar and hypothenar areas (the fleshy pads at the base of the thumb and little finger).

• The hypothenar (about 47%) and thenar (about 37%) regions carried most of the mean force. The heel of the hand does most of the supporting.
• Almost all participants (14 of 15) shifted their centre of pressure towards their dominant hand, which on average pushed about 9% more maximum force than the other.
• Wrist anatomy mattered: small differences in the relative length of the forearm bones were associated with more load on the little-finger side.

Caveats: fifteen people, all experienced gymnasts, one static hold. It doesn’t tell you what a beginner’s hands do, or what’s “right”. But two things match what I’ve felt:

1. Most of the weight sits in the heel of the hand, even when you’re cued to stay on the knuckles. The fingers are for correcting, not for carrying. The knuckle-line cue is about having somewhere to go, not about moving the load off the palm entirely.
2. People are lopsided. I lean towards one hand, and my entries drift to one side. Knowing it’s normal makes it easier to work on calmly.

The classic Loughborough work (Kerwin and Trewartha, 2001; Yeadon and Trewartha, 2003) explains why the wrist is doing so much: front-to-back balance is controlled mainly by torque at the wrist, with the shoulders and hips playing a supporting role.

Prep that worked for me

• A short wrist warm-up every session. Rocking through flexion and extension on hands and knees, palms up and palms down, side to side, a few minutes total. Prep, not a stretch session.
• Gradual extension under load. Pseudo-planche leans and push-ups build tolerance to loaded extension over weeks.
• Turn the hands out slightly (around 15°). For me it took pressure off the wrist and helped open the shoulders.
• Parallettes or fists on days the wrists are grumpy. They keep the wrist neutral, which let me keep practising balance without the extension.
• Forearm work outside handstand practice: wrist curls and reverse curls, light and high-rep.

Cues that spread the load

• Spread the fingers wide to make the base bigger.
• Grip the floor: active fingers, not flat, passive hands.
• Stack the shoulders over the hands. Leaning the shoulders past the wrists (unless you’re training planche) increases extension and load.
• Short sessions, often. Ten to fifteen minutes, many attempts, stop when entries get sloppy. Wrists, like tendons everywhere, adapt slowly (Deloads and Tendon Adaptation).

None of this is medical advice. If pain persists or is sharp, get it looked at.

Sources

• Scigliano, N. M., Goetz, J. E., Garcia Fleury, I., Dibbern, K. N., Petrachaianan, K. & Buckwalter, J. A. (2024). The effect of full-body weight-bearing on palmar pressure distribution in collegiate-level gymnasts. Sports Biomechanics, 23(12), 3301–3311.
• Kerwin, D. G. & Trewartha, G. (2001). Strategies for maintaining a handstand in the anterior-posterior direction. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 33(7).
• Yeadon, M. R. & Trewartha, G. (2003). Control strategy for a hand balance. Motor Control, 7(4).
• “A Primer on the Handstand”, orthopt.org.