The 5-Step Handstand Roadmap
Where you are, what comes next, and the order to build it in. Sent to your inbox.
A study,
not a practice.
It started in an Auckland living room in 2011, with one stubborn question: there has to be a better way to learn this than copying shapes.
From the first day, I have been studying it.
Taking it apart
on my own body.
I was not trying to get good at handstands. I was trying to understand why they fail.
A video convinced me there had to be a better way to learn this than imitating a position. I had watched enough people — myself first — copy a shape instead of building one, and get the same result: balance on a good day, nothing that held.
So I took it apart. Which structures carry the weight. Which ones quietly stop working. What it feels like a second before the handstand goes, rather than after. The answers were not complicated, but they were specific, and almost nobody was teaching them.
That is the difference between practising something and studying it. A practice repeats until it works. A study asks why it did not.
I have been helping people with it since that first year. In 2013 I stopped gardening and taught full-time. That changed how I earned a living. It did not change when this began.
Master Claude Victoria.
Claude Victoria was a circus master from France and a true legend in hand balancing. He taught generations of top performers. He is no longer with us.
I went because I saw how clean and strong his students looked. I already had a base — years of self-training, solid holds, even one-arm work from that living room. But technique was not the thing I was missing.
His house was small and in a quiet village. No gym. Worn mats, and a lot of history in the walls. He was in his seventies and still full of energy. We trained every day for five weeks, mostly one to one.
He did not rush into hard drills. We started with standing. Feeling the ground. Breathing properly, before I was allowed to kick up at all.
It's not just holding. It's respecting the line, the breath, the whole moment and how it feels.
Claude VictoriaHe spotted me twice in five weeks. Mostly he watched, and corrected details so small I had not known they were there. A finger out of place showed doubt. A held breath meant tension.
He taught me to move like a professional — calm control, and real respect for the old circus art of équilibre, exactly the way he said it.
One day, after many falls on one arm, he told me something I have never put down.
You have the technique. Now add the art.
Claude VictoriaClaude lit the fire. He showed me that a handstand is not strength and it is not a trick — it is presence, patience, and honouring the practice. But the method is not his ideas. It is what came from my own path afterwards.
Where it stopped
being personal.
I left Auckland the following spring and spent two years teaching my way around the world. Hot rooms in Asia. Tents in South America. Beaches, studios, wherever there was a wall.
That is where the method stopped being mine. A cue that works on one body is a preference. A cue that works in thirty-five countries is a method.
I saw what worked for beginners frightened to invert, for people stuck on the same plateau for years, for strong practitioners pushing one arm. I wrote notes on planes. I changed progressions when students showed me they were wrong.
Hong Kong came in 2016, and it has been home since.
Out of my head,
onto paper.
For years the method lived where methods usually die — in one person's head, and in the hands of whoever happened to be in the room.
Putting it together for the first time took a partner who could hold me to it. Glen Cordoza knows body mechanics like no one else. We spent three years explaining every detail, refusing to let a step through until it could be written plainly enough for someone else to teach it.
That work became the AoH Complete Course. It is the reason there is a method at all, rather than a talent.
What followed came from the same place: Level 4 for advanced work in 2024, the Teacher Training Manual in 2026, the One Arm course, and a book still being written.
Four steps,
in one order.
High standards. Straight lines. No cheating the balance. But the steps are simple, and they are in an order that does not move.
Education
Understand what you are building before you build it.
Activation
Five areas on, so effort becomes structure.
Balancing
Two inches, not two feet.
Consistency
Each step earns the next.
And a finish line, named out loud, which almost nobody in this field is willing to do: a two-minute handstand, ten presses and a one-arm — executed cleanly.
Every competitor sells progress. Saying what finished looks like is the only way a student can tell whether they have arrived.
Balance is not found.
It is built.
From that living room to now, the answer has not changed. It is still a study. It is just written down now, so it does not have to start over with every person who wants it.
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