Stéphane Perrin, and the road that led to Handstand Pro

This page exists for a simple reason: the articles on this site put forward a method, so here is more about who is proposing it, what I have actually practiced and where I stand today.
Fair warning, it runs a bit long, I tell pretty much everything in order.

Over six years of gymnastics, a decent level, and still no long handstand

I started gymnastics in a club at around 8, for a little over 2 years (that is where I met my best friend, she will recognise herself), then I stopped, started again a few years later, stopped again, and came back as a young adult: roughly two years each time. Very young, I had a decent level on floor and on apparatus, a bit of parallel bars, and uneven bars since the class was overwhelmingly female (the flexibility stayed with me, the rest much less so).

And yet I could not hold a handstand for long. It surprises everybody, but in a gymnastics class the handstand is not a skill you train for its own sake, it is one shape among many, a position you pass through, you are asked for three to five seconds before moving on, and staying up there was never really the goal. So you can do gymnastics for years without ever mastering the balance on your hands, which is exactly my case.

The patchy years

Then came a long stretch of on and off practice: on a few trips, on the beach here and there, a bit at the gym, a bit at home. Around 30, during a trip to Thailand, I got more serious about it, approaching the handstand the way I see climbing, a discipline made of skills you work one after the other to control your body better. From there I followed classes more regularly and tutorials, with big progress coming out of that consistency.

But if I stay honest, my practice remained very patchy, with focused stretches of two to six months at most and long gaps in between. Still, the taste for it never left me.

15 February 2023, one minute

For the record, at a time when I had made it one of my main goals, I trained for about three months, four to five sessions a week. I had strengthened and better structured my practice, and put the emphasis on shoulder work (the people around me noticed the muscle gain before I did, by the way).

Improving little by little, the peak came on 15 February 2023: I held one minute.
I was 36. The video exists and I still have it. I will publish it here soon.

Why I stopped right after

Life and priorities. It may sound strange to stop at your best moment, and there was no real decision, just three things adding up.

To keep progressing past a minute, I had to move on to new shapes, which meant changing the work itself and not simply holding longer. I took up running in the same period and available time is not extensible. And above all, there is a reason far more trivial than the other two: the exercises I was supposed to work on next, the 7 and the single leg 7, require pressing a foot upside down at hip height, and I had no box, no board, no low wall at that height where I trained. The missing support is what made me let go. I tell this because I am convinced that many people stop for reasons of that kind, not for lack of motivation.

The app, five years of an idea before the first line of code

The idea for Handstand Pro has been around since roughly 2021, and it has been the same one from the start: a Duolingo of the handstand, something that structures a personal practice with levels, programs and measurable standards to move up. I already had the features in mind, the design and the exercises, years before writing any code.

In July 2024 I am between two jobs, I start playing with Claude to see what it is worth on iOS development, and within a few days I get a prototype that already serves me and my own practice. I mention it on my Instagram account and about ten people step up and chip in to pay for the Apple developer licence. With that I was able to offer them an alpha version to test (the WhatsApp group of those ten still exists, big up to them too!).

Their feedback at the time: the structured path to progress genuinely helps, and demo videos were missing, which made some exercises and some complex positions hard to understand (that is a big part of the current, rebooted version).

And then the end of summer 2024 arrives and everything lands at once: I change jobs, I move in with someone, we look for a flat, renovation work, a move. The prototype does not budge for almost two years. In the summer of 2025 I ship an update so the ten can keep using it, but development does not restart for all that.

Mid June 2026, the third attempt, and this one is the right one

Once settled into the new flat, in the middle of the first heatwave, I restarted development and practice in the same month. Doing both together commits me and keeps me motivated. Three weeks after the restart I was at around 10 seconds, then 20, then 25, and as I write these lines in early August, 46 seconds. It climbs back nicely as the app moves forward.

I give my own numbers here, they will be different for everyone depending on their background and their current shape.

A word of caution about overtraining: at the end of July 2026, a month and a half after the restart, my right hand started to get seriously tired and I had to stop for a few days. The cause was simple and entirely my fault: I was rushing my warm-ups, or skipping them altogether, before filming a few attempts for stories. Since then, wrist rotations and flexions are systematic.

Where I stand today

I am 40 and 5 kg heavier than I was at the time of my record. I train four to six times a week, in sessions of ten to twenty minutes, almost always in the morning before work, a bit later on weekends and on holiday.

Right now I am working on getting my sense of balance back and on a better shoulder opening, which is decent without being excellent and remains my limit, and I am also working on my tuck. I have made progress on freestanding holds with feet together. I still go to the wall, chest to wall especially, as much to strengthen my shoulders as for my line and my opening, and I really like the split handstand, one leg forward and one back, as well as toe taps at the wall with the hands placed fairly far away, which I find fantastic for progress.

What I learned that you will not find in tutorials

What took me the longest, and what I am still working on as I write this page, is finding the right amount of energy in the corrections. It takes practice time for those adjustments to become almost unconscious, and that is the real reason I recommend short and frequent sessions.

On consistency, I have done both and the result leaves no doubt. When I am consistent, at least four to five times a week even in small sessions, that is when I make my biggest progress. When I tell myself I will do some now and then without a real program, I have gone backwards every single time, and I do mean backwards.

On group classes, it depends entirely on the level. I took several where there were a lot of complete beginners, which gave me an hour of practice without learning anything in particular, whereas with advanced teachers I got very useful cues and discovered exercises that I have been putting into the app since.

About the headstand: I do not do it, or very rarely. I have done a few inversions in yoga classes, headstand included, I find it interesting and it works on real things, but I do not think it is necessary to learn the handstand.

What my practice changes in the app

The logic of the app is the same as in 2024, everything else has changed, the whole design. My practice drives the choices, in particular how the timers work, because I use it myself every day for my own training and I see immediately what gets in my way. Being an Apple enthusiast and fairly geeky, I have followed the developer conferences for a long time, which lets me bring in new iOS capabilities when they actually serve a purpose, for example Live Activities to follow a timer when the app is not in the foreground.

And a bonus, the commitment I made publicly on 31 July 2026: 500 paying subscribers by 31 December 2026. It is ambitious, and writing it down somewhere makes it harder to push back.

On how this site is written

The method choices, the exercises, the standards and the numbers on these pages are mine and come from my practice. For the prose, I had solid help from my friend Claude, and I would rather own that clearly. If a sentence reads false to you, tell me!

Back to the complete guide: How to learn a handstand