- The 10 minute handstand thing -

10 minutes long handstand -

“Just do it man” (Sascha Bachman)
I guess that’s all I really needed to hear…

A few months ago I took upon myself to finally tackle this 10 min endurance challenge….

I was introduced to the "high numbers” through Andrey Moraru who reached an impressive 26min long hold back in this school days in Ukraine. I then met the legendary Denis Tolstov (through Andrey) who held a hand stand for 1 hour long!!! back in the "Good old" Kiev circus school days. The up and coming circus artist Sacha Bachman recently completed 45 min on his hands before graduating from the Montreal national circus school. There are of course countless and nameless Chinese kids who do this stuff before breakfast but lets not go there…

OK back to my personal challenge.
As you recall, my approach was to break those 10 minutes into 3-4 segments and slowly decrease the resting time in between. For the last couple of months I have been doing these sessions 2-3 times per week in the end of practice and have been slowly been increasing the length of my holds and also decreasing the resting periods in between. My Endurance sessions looked and progressed as follows:

4 x 2:30 (60 sec rest in between sets)
4 x 2:30 (30 sec rest)
3 x 3:20 (60 sec rest)
3 x 3:30 (40 sec rest)
5:00 (1 min rest) + 2 x 2:30 (30 sec rest)
6:00 (1 min rest) + 2 x 2:00 (30 sec rest)

*I also added long holds against the wall inspired by John Sapinosso and the Ido portal team, and reached a 20 min wall assisted hold which was a great addition to my preparation.


So this is where I was last week before a random chat with Sascha Bachman, who basically told me to forget a little about the progressions…, "Just go for it” and approach it more as a psychological /mental challenge rather than a physical one.

Today happened to be a nice day so I went outside to practice. I was a little short on time, so I decided to go for some technique work and then an endurance session... Although I had the 10 min on the back of my mind, I still didn’t really decide to go for it… 6 minutes into it I started to think, why not..., one minute at a time, one arm handstand at a time... And there I was, at the 10 minutes mark with some fatigue but not something to write home about…

So what’s next? Time will tell…
My Personal record of more than 10 minute long handstand.
It took me 51 consecutive one arm handstands to complete this endurance set!


Video Speed: X 6
Date: September 3rd 2014
Performed by Yuval Ayalon
Music: by Irma Thomas