It demonstrates balance and control over your body, something we happen to put great importance upon here at Nerd Fitness. It’s also one HELL of a party trick, something you can work on without a single piece of equipment, builds functional strength and muscular endurance, and it’s a skill you can work on in just a few minutes every single day.

How do I know this? Because I’m typing this while in a handstand RIGHT NOW. Okay, I can’t do that. But Jim, Master of the NF Fitness Universe can:

jim typing

I love working with gymnastic rings, because they have such a great tutorial level. Handstands are exactly the same way: it’s a great skill to work on as a beginner, but also is infinitely challenging depending on your skill level.

Plus, in addition to Jim, Luke Skywalker does them. It’s time to stop looking at other people doing cool things and start today saying “hey, I can do that too!”

Why handstands are awesome

Jim-Bathurst

Team Nerd Fitness member Jim Bathurst has been training and working on handstands for years. From humble beginnings, he taught himself a standard handstand and eventually worked his way up to one-handed tricks like the photo above.

Now, you won’t be doing this anytime soon, but it doesn’t mean you can’t start today learning how to go inverted.

Fun fact: I can’t say the word inverted without thinking of Top Gun’s line “because we were inverted,” but that’s only because I used to watch that movie with my brother every day from ages 3 to 5.

I’ve fallen in love with handstands for a few reasons:

Like other bodyweight training, there’s no excuse. If you have room to stand up, you have room to practice handstands.

It recruits DOZENS of muscles in your body. From arm strength to wrist mobility to core strength to shoulder mobility and muscular endurance, handstands do it all. When you are trying to balance, it makes your body work as one complete unit.

It scares you – yes, that’s a positive. We grow outside our comfort zone and for many people, just the thought of a handstand is enough to make their palms sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. Vomi… nevermind. The point is that the handstand is just as much of a mental challenge as it is a physical one. How scared do you think this guy gets on a regular basis?

Your body is a machine that constantly reinvents itself. Every minute of every day, it breaks down its own tissues and replaces them with new stuff it makes from a combination of the food you eat and recycled material it scavenges from other tissues.

No matter how old your Facebook profile says you are, your component parts are considerably younger. Even your bones replace themselves every 10 years. By that standard, your muscle cells, with an average age of 15 years old, are the adults at the party. 

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Your workouts will cause the protein in your muscles to break down and build up much faster than it does in ordinary circumstances. In fact, when you work out with the goal of becoming more awesome than you are now, the entire point is to get that protein to turn over. But it only helps if you end up with more than you had when you started.

There are two ways to do that. The first, and by far the easiest, is to eat more protein than you currently do. Protein, all by itself, is anabolic. It wants to be stored in your muscles. The second is to work out in a way that disrupts your muscles and forces them to respond by getting bigger and stronger.

The combination of a diet rich in high-quality protein (like this whey protein powder from the Men’s Health store) and a great strength-training program is the oldest, best, and only non-pharmaceutical way to reach that goal. This article will show you how much protein you need to eat, and when.

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There is no man that will say he enjoys the bottom of a barbell squat.

It’s the portion of the exercise where you probably feel the most uncomfortable. And if you fail or dump the weight, it usually happens when you’re in the hole.

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That’s why I want you to hang out in the bottom of the squat longer.

Related: THE 21-DAY METASHRED—an At-Home Body-Shredding Program That Strips Away Fat and Reveals Lean, Hard Muscle

A pause squat requires you to come to a full, extended stop at the lowest part of the rep. Now, this is by no means an Earth-shattering idea. However, it’s something I find many guys (coaches and trainers included) don’t do often enough.

Here are the main benefits of pause squats:

1. You  strengthen the weakest portion of your squat.

2. You gain more confidence and learn to become more comfortable “in the hole.”
3. You increase your muscles’  Time Under Tension (TUT), which plays a major role with increased mass. In short: more TUT = bigger muscles.

What you scarf post-workout matters for building and repairing muscle. And while scientists have long known that protein should be a key component of whatever you consume to get the job done, two new studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reveal one reason whywhey protein stands above all others: It’s the leucine.

“Whey is a high-quality milk protein that’s a rich source of the essential amino acid leucine,” says Stefan Pasiakos, Ph.D., a physiologist with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. And consuming lots of leucine leads to greater muscle protein synthesis—the intricate process that helps promote the remodeling, repair, and muscle growth that occurs after exercise, the study explains.

More from MensHealth.com: The Truth About Protein

In Pasiakos’ study, military members rode stationary bikes for 60 minutes at a moderate intensity on two separate occasions. Both times they chugged a beverage with equal amounts of protein, but one drink contained 1.9 grams of leucine, while the other packed 3.5 grams. (For reference: 10 grams of regular whey protein contains about 1 gram of leucine.) Researchers found protein synthesis was 33 percent higher after the larger leucine dose. “Leucine can help trigger complex signaling networks within muscles that turn on muscle protein synthesis,” Pasiakos says.

Meanwhile, the second American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found that consuming 25 grams of whey protein that contained 3.5 grams of leucine after a resistance training workout led to higher blood concentrations of amino acids, including leucine, than when participants downed smaller repeat doses of whey meant to mimic another type of protein called casein. The reason? Whey is digested quickly, and makes essential amino acids available sooner—leading to a greater muscle protein synthesis response, Pasiakos says.

Currently, in the United States, improving physical fitness and overall levels of health is largely regulated to two different elements; that of exercise and diet. Yet, to simply focus only on these two elements of physical well being is to do a disservice to what is required to live a healthy, fulfilled life.

This section of our website is intended to shed light on a part of fitness that is often overlooked: that of mental health, stability, and wellness. The mental stability and well being of an individual is subject to disease and entropy just as the body is. This being said, when compared to physical and nutritional health, mental health and wellness is equally important. Hence, to truly live a lifestyle that is filled with good health and fitness, individuals must include achieving mental wellness as well.

One approach to ensuring mental balance and wellness that can be utilized, and has been for thousands of years, is the practice of meditation. While meditation can be, and often is, practiced independently, it can be paired with several other exercise types including Yoga and Pilates.

Origin of Meditation

The earliest records of meditation date back to 50,000 years ago. The practice originally developed as a ritual involved in a number of different religions. In fact, almost every major religion utilizes meditation in one form or another, from Hinduism to Christianity. Throughout time, however, the practice has found a place outside of the realm of religion. This is most likely because people became aware of the vast array of benefits that meditation can provide a person even when it is void of any religious implications.

Although Meditation and Yoga are very closely related, Meditation as a formal and separate practice did not arise until much later, a little more than 5,000 years ago (actual recorded writings about Meditation). Granted, people have likely been practicing some form of meditation since the beginning of their existence. Any time that you take some time out to gather your thought or get some fresh air to clear your mind, you are technically using meditation to relax and focus your mind.