1) It was incredibly full of fluff. The actual content was actually not unuseful, it made me want to start practicing handstands, but the whole thing could have been quite brief without all the memes and marketing.
2) The gifs of the exercises (not the memes) were far superior for a reader compared with embedding, or worse linking, youtube videos. They did both here but I was already in skimming mode from all the fluff. I've read a lot of articles on gym stuff lately and it's pretty annoying having to repeatedly scan through 20 min videos for a 5 second demonstration.
I couldn’t agree more. Why the author would want their long-form writing to resemble a concatenated tweet thread is beyond me; do they assume a short attention span in their audience?
There far fewer gymnasts than general population so I'm not sure their opinions matter as much to your average slacker nerd who are trying to impress their friends and not gymnasts?
Did you even look at the article? There's no ads, no affiliate links. (unless you call the authors offering their professional services ads, of course)
I disagree. I think the article was very well written, considering it's basically just an SEO page.
1) First of all, it starts with a short, numerated table of contents at the very top that includes everything that the article covers (with clickable links so you can skip the fluff)
2) It includes textual descriptions, videos and GIFs that make it very easy to understand the exercises.
3) The article also explains not just WHAT you should do, but also WHY you should do it
4) It's written in an entertaining way (it's a matter of taste, but I kinda like it)
5) While they do try to sell their stuff, it's pretty transparent and they are not hiding anything behind a paywall.
My days are always better when I start them with some handstand pushups against the wall. It's better than coffee at waking me up and is an excellent source of feedback on body weight status. Also takes very little time.
I highly recommend incorporating at least a static hand stand against the wall into your morning routine, then try work up to turning it into full blown handstand pushups just a little bit at a time.
Used to just do pushups daily, then my friend's girlfriend who did acrobatics and crap talked me into doing handstands with her one day. Never looked back, material QoL improvement ever since, thanks Stefi!
Why not just do incline or decline push-ups? Or weighted pull ups? I feel like handstand push-ups increase your risk of serious arm nerve compression injuries, like ulnar nerve compression at the wrist.
It doesn't seem like an issue for me, if it did I'd explore alternatives.
I already do lots of pushups daily and have for decades, the handstand pushups are just something I enjoy in the morning. It's more how I finish my morning stretches than exercise.
The lots of pushups probably already has my wrists well prepared for the activity.
It’s not great for your shoulder long term. As a rule of thumb, when lifting heavy weight if your hands are not in front of your body you are putting unnecessary stress on the joint. A handstand would put your hands right above your head. Overhead pressing is bad for the shoulder, better alternative is Landmine presses at 45 degree, or decline push-ups.
That’s bs and not sustainable.
Choose a routine that won’t kill you when you get a little older. I can do muscle ups, headstand, handstands and all these calisthenics things but not that early in the morning without warmup
I was a little bummed that a site called nerdfitness was full of memes and cliches. I was hoping for something more along the lines of defining a model of the world; defining a goal to achieve; explaining how to build a system that applies the model to solve the goal.
Listen nerd, there are lots of kinds of nerds in the world. Embrace it. The article has a lot of good information, it’s clearly not clickbate. It’s just catering presentation to the audience that’s interested, and that’s good because they’ll probably not hurt themselves and might actually do a handstand.
NF is not so much nerds in the sense like here in hacker news. Mainly geek culture with comic book fans, movies, books, myths and rpg larp culture. It’s mainly a community where people who are inspired by stories of pop culture get together, craft their own stories and alter egos for self improvement (especially in health) and encourage each other. I’ve been in on it for nearly a year and recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good community to get some encouragement. I’ve made more progress by participating in this group than I’ve ever had in my life and the best part of it is it has helped me get some consistency in my new habits.
Slightly off-topic, but if you're looking something more hacker-like (not so-called-nerd-like), then I can highly suggest The Hacker's Diet: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet
I'm not sure what's in this book, but nutrition is actually very simple. Eat real, unprocessed foods (whichever you like, no veggies necessary), do include lots of meat, and fast frequently.
My wife replaced most of her diet with beef (which she used to think was unhealthy), started fasting, and lost 50 pounds in a few months (people would say it was impossible/unsafe if I gave the exact amount) and now looks like a supermodel. The real food helped her headaches and depression, and she stopped taking a bunch of medicine. Both of us are aging in reverse.
If you think I'm oversimplifying, maybe it's just not that complicated. My wife's experience is proof of that. It really frustrates me how we've taken something so simple and natural like food and made a huge mess of it.
I hit the back button to reply to your comment, at first I thought it'd be a few images, but the GIFs and "memes" are pointless and don't add anything from an information or humor standpoint.
I was hoping the “nerd” aspect referred to an emphasis on theoretical aspects (less charitably called “broscience”). I assume a lot of other HN commenters like me tended to research and study fitness when first diving into it.
The article has some good information, but I was disappointed in the execution. As disappointed as when George from Stranger Things caught his best friend Mark kissing his crush Ellie after they’ve killed a monster while listening to A-Ha (I assume that’s what usually happens on the show).
I hurt myself doing handstands in college. I was doing them for several weeks, was getting to the point where I could start to walk, maybe take 5 steps. Then I felt a sudden pain in my neck and I crumpled, and that was it. For years after when I sneezed I would feel shooting pain in neck. Never thought, hey I should go to the doctor. Not sure if my experience was a fluke, but I am still tempted to try again (at 47), but it is scary.
I tried figuring it out with no guidance as a carefree 18 year old and managed to have a very unclean handstand.
I tried relearning it properly as a 30year old and found out that a decade or computer work left me without the proper shoulder mobility to protract overhead with decent internal rotation.
As a result I can get severe neckpain (usually 4-6 weeks to recover) coming from overactive upper traps
I was in a very similar situation myself, didn't realize how much spending ~8yrs doing computer work caused other muscles to atrophy, had difficulty not overly engaging upper traps + arms for everything when trying a fitness plan.
I've slowly gotten to the point where I'm fairly well-rounded as far as being able to use core, pecs, glutes, lats etc. during various exercises, without overly taxing upper traps.
If I were to do things over again I'd probably start with a regular yoga practice just to get better mind-body connection and get full body strength to a decent baseline.
For handstands specifically you might check out this guy's video which imo is well thought out, thorough, designed for people not already in shape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XJ2zR5tE0I
From the same guy, I've been following a full body mobility routine which you may find useful too—seems to hit a lot of spots that get problematic through desk work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2SOrScNbww
As to general shoulder health and for something different. I found TGU (Turkish Getups) to be fantastic !
Ive always tried to limit the amount of weight I do with these and do it at most every other day, vs say everyday !
Is definitely (weirdly so) one the exercises that always made me "feel good and strong". Its generally considered a "slow lift" and it can become quite meditative !
Probably just a muscle spasm. This has happened to me a lot when I start a new exercise or restart an exercise after a long layoff, particularly handstand push-ups and to a lesser extent other exercises targeting the neck or upper back. It’s actually interesting you had the same experience, it’s not it’s me.
In this comment section: techies giving confident fitness advice. Exercise is good for you when done right. There is risk of injury when done wrong. Much like any other skill, exercises can be learned, and how fast you learn things varies. If you can, get someone knowledgeable to guide you, it makes the learning process both easier and less frustrating.
Why do you think that being physically fit/active and being a techie is mutually exclusive? Wouldn't the high incomes from being in tech mean more money and time to spend on health and wellness? I have always found the stereotype of un-athletic nerd to be silly and not remotely true in real life.
> Why do you think that being physically fit/active and being a techie is mutually exclusive?
Nothing in the comment seems to say that:
> In this comment section: techies giving confident fitness advice. Exercise is good for you when done right. There is risk of injury when done wrong. Much like any other skill, exercises can be learned, and how fast you learn things varies. If you can, get someone knowledgeable to guide you, it makes the learning process both easier and less frustrating.
I think it rather says that techies, whether physically active or not, are prone to give confident advice that doesn't necessarily become less confident when it leaves their field of expertise. That is, I took it to be caveat lector—some techies are physically active and knowledgable (which is important!) and some aren't both of those things; you can't tell from reading a confident comment whether it is the voice of earned expertise or the voice of presumed expertise; and, if you're one of the techies who isn't yet physically fit, then getting in over your head (literally, I suppose, for handstands) or developing bad form can be quick paths to injury.
> In this comment section: techies giving confident fitness advice
Aside from the well earned reputation programmers have for believing they can solve any problem, this is good old bro science. Popular on the Internet. And worth ignoring, or at least being very skeptical about. Bad advice can be pretty dangerous.
What here is "bro science"? It's a standard handstand progression. Basically what you'd teach a kid starting gymnastics. The only things I might change are:
- practice methods of bailing out from the start
- after wall-walk, rather than taking both legs off the wall with your body facing the wall, kick up so you're facing away from the wall and try to achieve balance
1) Facing a wall place your hands on the ground a shoulder width apart about a foot away from it.
2) now on your hands and feet, kick one leg up towards the wall, then land it back on the ground.
3) repeat 2, try to get your leg higher and higher, allowing your second leg to also leave the ground.
Keep doing this until you go vertical. If you go past vertical your legs will simply touch the wall and you can push off it back onto the ground.
Once you get comfortable doing this you'll find you're able to Handstand without touching the wall and can hold it. At this point ensure your head also goes vertical.
Practice handstands every day and you should be able to do them in just a few weeks.
> [From HN Guidelines] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Your comment feels like a shallow dismissal because it seems oversimplified to me. I am ~90% confident if I followed your suggestion I would be injured. While the article provides advice on how to proceed through each stage fairly safely. In fact, in the tips and tricks section of the article there appears to be a video of someone following your suggestion and injuring themselves.
I learned handstands at a circus school and this tutorial indeed looks very similar to what we where doing.
The article also suggests a belly-to-wall handstands at some point, which (according to my teachers) is a much better exercise for a proper handstand then a back-to-wall handstands.
Two things that help me practice these days:
- voice-controlled timer to keep track of handstand time: https://timeless.aslushnikov.com/ (I didn’t find any readily available so hacked my own)
I started taking a class at the local gym called "Calisthenics" and a lot of it's about working up strength and balance to get to a handstand.
I had no idea what that word meant before taking it, but I've been doing it for a couple of weeks and can confidently "float" up to a handstand! Can't hold it for very long though, so I'm working on that.
Readit News
1) It was incredibly full of fluff. The actual content was actually not unuseful, it made me want to start practicing handstands, but the whole thing could have been quite brief without all the memes and marketing.
2) The gifs of the exercises (not the memes) were far superior for a reader compared with embedding, or worse linking, youtube videos. They did both here but I was already in skimming mode from all the fluff. I've read a lot of articles on gym stuff lately and it's pretty annoying having to repeatedly scan through 20 min videos for a 5 second demonstration.
Yes. It’s probably a valid assumption. We are not necessarily their target market.
> A handstand is one of the coolest exercises ever, but it’s also one of the most advanced moves to learn.
I doubt any gymnast would agree with either point.
Don't be so aggressive just because they've got a different understanding of humor then you do.
>https://antranik.org/comprehensive-handstand-tutorial/
1) First of all, it starts with a short, numerated table of contents at the very top that includes everything that the article covers (with clickable links so you can skip the fluff)
2) It includes textual descriptions, videos and GIFs that make it very easy to understand the exercises.
3) The article also explains not just WHAT you should do, but also WHY you should do it
4) It's written in an entertaining way (it's a matter of taste, but I kinda like it)
5) While they do try to sell their stuff, it's pretty transparent and they are not hiding anything behind a paywall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
I highly recommend incorporating at least a static hand stand against the wall into your morning routine, then try work up to turning it into full blown handstand pushups just a little bit at a time.
Used to just do pushups daily, then my friend's girlfriend who did acrobatics and crap talked me into doing handstands with her one day. Never looked back, material QoL improvement ever since, thanks Stefi!
It feels a lot better(and arguably looks cooler)
I already do lots of pushups daily and have for decades, the handstand pushups are just something I enjoy in the morning. It's more how I finish my morning stretches than exercise.
The lots of pushups probably already has my wrists well prepared for the activity.
Dead Comment
But the exercises do look useful.
My wife replaced most of her diet with beef (which she used to think was unhealthy), started fasting, and lost 50 pounds in a few months (people would say it was impossible/unsafe if I gave the exact amount) and now looks like a supermodel. The real food helped her headaches and depression, and she stopped taking a bunch of medicine. Both of us are aging in reverse.
If you think I'm oversimplifying, maybe it's just not that complicated. My wife's experience is proof of that. It really frustrates me how we've taken something so simple and natural like food and made a huge mess of it.
The article has some good information, but I was disappointed in the execution. As disappointed as when George from Stranger Things caught his best friend Mark kissing his crush Ellie after they’ve killed a monster while listening to A-Ha (I assume that’s what usually happens on the show).
I tried figuring it out with no guidance as a carefree 18 year old and managed to have a very unclean handstand.
I tried relearning it properly as a 30year old and found out that a decade or computer work left me without the proper shoulder mobility to protract overhead with decent internal rotation.
As a result I can get severe neckpain (usually 4-6 weeks to recover) coming from overactive upper traps
I've slowly gotten to the point where I'm fairly well-rounded as far as being able to use core, pecs, glutes, lats etc. during various exercises, without overly taxing upper traps.
If I were to do things over again I'd probably start with a regular yoga practice just to get better mind-body connection and get full body strength to a decent baseline.
For handstands specifically you might check out this guy's video which imo is well thought out, thorough, designed for people not already in shape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XJ2zR5tE0I
From the same guy, I've been following a full body mobility routine which you may find useful too—seems to hit a lot of spots that get problematic through desk work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2SOrScNbww
Ive always tried to limit the amount of weight I do with these and do it at most every other day, vs say everyday !
Is definitely (weirdly so) one the exercises that always made me "feel good and strong". Its generally considered a "slow lift" and it can become quite meditative !
Nothing in the comment seems to say that:
> In this comment section: techies giving confident fitness advice. Exercise is good for you when done right. There is risk of injury when done wrong. Much like any other skill, exercises can be learned, and how fast you learn things varies. If you can, get someone knowledgeable to guide you, it makes the learning process both easier and less frustrating.
I think it rather says that techies, whether physically active or not, are prone to give confident advice that doesn't necessarily become less confident when it leaves their field of expertise. That is, I took it to be caveat lector—some techies are physically active and knowledgable (which is important!) and some aren't both of those things; you can't tell from reading a confident comment whether it is the voice of earned expertise or the voice of presumed expertise; and, if you're one of the techies who isn't yet physically fit, then getting in over your head (literally, I suppose, for handstands) or developing bad form can be quick paths to injury.
Aside from the well earned reputation programmers have for believing they can solve any problem, this is good old bro science. Popular on the Internet. And worth ignoring, or at least being very skeptical about. Bad advice can be pretty dangerous.
- practice methods of bailing out from the start
- after wall-walk, rather than taking both legs off the wall with your body facing the wall, kick up so you're facing away from the wall and try to achieve balance
Here's how I taught myself:
1) Facing a wall place your hands on the ground a shoulder width apart about a foot away from it. 2) now on your hands and feet, kick one leg up towards the wall, then land it back on the ground. 3) repeat 2, try to get your leg higher and higher, allowing your second leg to also leave the ground.
Keep doing this until you go vertical. If you go past vertical your legs will simply touch the wall and you can push off it back onto the ground.
Once you get comfortable doing this you'll find you're able to Handstand without touching the wall and can hold it. At this point ensure your head also goes vertical.
Practice handstands every day and you should be able to do them in just a few weeks.
Your comment feels like a shallow dismissal because it seems oversimplified to me. I am ~90% confident if I followed your suggestion I would be injured. While the article provides advice on how to proceed through each stage fairly safely. In fact, in the tips and tricks section of the article there appears to be a video of someone following your suggestion and injuring themselves.
The article also suggests a belly-to-wall handstands at some point, which (according to my teachers) is a much better exercise for a proper handstand then a back-to-wall handstands.
Two things that help me practice these days:
- voice-controlled timer to keep track of handstand time: https://timeless.aslushnikov.com/ (I didn’t find any readily available so hacked my own)
- facebook’s “Handstands Anonymous” group to boost motivation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/handstandsanonymous/?ref=sha...
I had no idea what that word meant before taking it, but I've been doing it for a couple of weeks and can confidently "float" up to a handstand! Can't hold it for very long though, so I'm working on that.