Video exampler: coming soon…
Video tutorial: coming soon…
Recommended prerequisites: kip-up
Description: Once you learn the kip-up, you can cruise into no-hand land and do the no-handed kip-up. As the name tells you, it's a kip-up done without your hands on the ground helping you push. And to me, this requires 100% more concentration and effort. And your neck won't be too happy with you either.
Slide by slide breakdown
Start in the same position you do for a handed kip-up, only ditch the hands. Keep them by your side. Since the hands are taken out of the movement, the head is responsible for the last push off the ground. So beware: your neck will take a beating. Warm-up and expect soreness.
Just like before, we're going to extend, chamber, and then explode with the legs. Only this time, a funky thing has to happen: the arms have to mimic the motion of the legs. This will be eerily apparent in the coming slides.
More leg raise, more arm raise. See? They mimic each other through the entire motion. They rise together, chamber together, and push together.
I'm only showing you so many slides right now so you can see that I'm not lying to you about the arms and legs and their holy matrimony.
Oh, look at that. My legs chambered…and so did my arms!
Now things get serious. Without your hands for a push, you really need to push your legs high into the sky and explode your arms up, too. Another thing the arms do on a traditional kip-up is anchor the upper body in place, which allows you to get more push from your chamber and kick. In other words, you're working from a deficit all around on this trick. Without your full effort, you won't get far.
Gravity already took hold of my legs. My arms are like Frankenstein trying to get me height. Without arms to push, something has to get the upper body off of the ground…and that something is your neck. In the regular kip-up, the hands push right after the kick. In the no hand kip-up, the neck pushes after the arms and legs fly in the air.
And here enters neck soreness. (Don't forget: warm-up your neck before doing these.) Because there's less power going into the move, you'll get less height. You're going to have to arch hard, but don't expect to land high.
Arch hard and aim to land on your tip toes. That's all you can do with the height you'll have.
So it doesn't make any possible sense of how I'd land this trick based on this slide…unless I take my previous advice: when you're short on height, you have to drop into a squat. And if you don't think about this, you can see how it's really easy to continually crash this move. From the slide above, you're only about an inch away from crashing back into the grass.
From a few slides back: aim to land on the tip toes. Did that, and now hips are dropping so that I can be in that squat position. With the hips dropping, my upper body can come up easier. Look at my hands. They're still reaching forward.
With the hips dropping and the torso and hands reacchiiinnngggg forward, you'll be able to fight your way into a deep squat on your tip toes. I hope you've been practicing and training your deep squat strength.
Hopefully whenever you land this, you still have some semblance of feeling left in your neck muscles. And hopefully you have no headache.
Troubleshooting:
Headache? Yeah, told you about that. Headache can come from general neck tension required to push off the ground or from actually using the back of your head to push with and the pressure involved there. Just take it easy and ease your way into this trick. Take the time to rest if you need it — practice your regular kip-ups in the meantime.
Landing low? Good. You're landing. I land low, too.
Landing on your back? If you can do a kip-up fine, then you probably just need to give more effort. You get height from three things: arm push, leg push, and neck push. And as you can see from the slides, I don't get much height. And so you go to the landing bucket. Landing requires three things: tip toes, back arch, and squat drop. See if you can find one of those areas you struggle with most.
Your next conquest:
- Rolling kip-up (coming soon)