Why this writer is obsessed with perfecting his handstand

If I stay up (or down, depending on your perspective) for longer than 12 seconds, it’s a good day. One that deserves a celebration on the scale of Fourth of July fireworks. But I’m usually done in 10 seconds before falling just as inelegantly as when I got up. Then I do it again. And again.

When I’m not doing a handstand, I think about it. I worry when I don’t do it every day. I visualize what it must be like to do it in the middle of the room, away from the safe wall.

Or I’m training on YouTube, groaning my way through Day Christensenit’s insanely difficult Drills for the foundation.

In the handstand community—yes, that’s a thing—Day is a legend. She has over 50,000 hardcore Instagram followers. Her handstands are amazing works of art. She can enter with a pull-up jump, a standing or seated pull-up, or a pike pull-up. And she can stay upside down for a long time, which in my world does not exceed five seconds.

It looks so easy when Day does a handstand. Besides, I know it isn’t. I have been known to lie on the couch and watch her all day, marveling at the level of strength, control and balance required to do what she does.

When Day arrived in Singapore in mid-August to hold handstand workshops, it was as if Mariah, Oprah, Beyoncé and Adele were in the studio at the same time. The overwhelming fabulousness of the moment was too much to bear, especially since two of her star students Li Xian and Sara were also present.

To watch these women casually place their hands on the mat and then rise effortlessly into the air like champagne bubbles with such control, grace and power was to realize that despite my best daily efforts and diligence, I, for all intents and purposes, targets, mainly a deformed, asthmatic subtropical frog.

For two days, I huffed and puffed my way through Day’s drills, turning bright red, while Li Xian and Sara barely raised a faint glow, not a strand of hair ever falling out of place. I was no closer to a handstand at the end than when I started. It is only now that I am more convinced than ever that I may also have physical dyslexia.