A handspring is an acrobatic move where you launch your body forward or backward, pass through a handstand position, and push off the ground with your hands to land on your feet. It’s one of the foundational skills in gymnastics, cheerleading, and competitive tumbling, serving as both a standalone move and a building block for more advanced flips and twists.
How a Handspring Works
The defining feature of a handspring is the brief moment when your full body weight transfers through your hands. You start on your feet, rotate through an inverted position with your hands on the ground, then snap your body back to your feet. The entire move takes roughly one second and requires a coordinated burst of power from your legs, core, and shoulders.
What separates a handspring from a cartwheel or a simple handstand is the explosive push-off. Rather than balancing on your hands, you’re driving through them, using the ground as a springboard to complete the rotation. Your body should pass through an arched shape and then “snap down,” meaning your legs whip over quickly to bring you back upright.
Front Handspring vs. Back Handspring
Handsprings come in two main varieties, and each one moves the body in a different direction.
A front handspring starts with a forward run or hurdle. You reach toward the ground in front of you, plant your hands, and push off to rotate forward onto your feet. In competitive gymnastics, front handsprings are commonly linked into tumbling passes, with the current standard at higher levels being a front handspring followed by front layouts and front tucks. They also appear in vault, where a basic front handspring off the table carries a difficulty value of 1.00 under the international scoring code.
A back handspring begins from a standing position or a backward movement. You sit back (almost like dropping into a chair), swing your arms, and jump backward, arching over your hands before snapping your feet down to land. Back handsprings are the more common of the two and the backbone of backward tumbling. A typical competitive tumbling pass might chain together multiple back handsprings before launching into a layout or twist. A well-executed back handspring by a six-foot-tall person covers roughly 8 to 12 feet of floor space, which gives a sense of how much horizontal travel the skill involves.
What Your Body Does During a Handspring
Handsprings demand coordinated effort from nearly every major muscle group. Your glutes and quadriceps generate the initial jump. Your core muscles stabilize your body as it rotates through the inverted position. Your shoulders and chest absorb your weight during the hand contact and then push you back off the ground. Your calf muscles play a critical role in absorbing the landing impact, activating strongly in the first fraction of a second after your feet hit the floor.
Trained gymnasts handle landing forces differently than untrained people. Research on neuromuscular patterns shows that experienced gymnasts activate their landing muscles at nearly half the intensity of non-gymnasts during the moment just before contact. This doesn’t mean they’re weaker. It means their nervous systems have learned to time the force absorption more efficiently, spreading the impact across joints rather than braking all at once.
Handsprings in Cheerleading vs. Gymnastics
The core technique of a handspring is the same whether you’re in a gym or on a cheer mat, but the presentation and setup differ. In cheerleading, athletes typically take one to three backward steps while swinging their arms to build momentum before a standing back handspring. They also land with their arms locked down at their sides, which keeps a squad of 28 people looking uniform during choreography. In gymnastics, the arms finish overhead after landing, which positions the gymnast to connect directly into the next skill.
One persistent issue cheer coaches and gymnastics coaches both flag is rushed progression. Athletes who skip foundational work and jump straight to back handsprings often develop habits that are hard to fix later, like not opening the shoulders fully or collapsing through the handstand phase. Several experienced coaches note that athletes who can’t hold a solid handstand or push up into a proper bridge aren’t ready for a handspring, regardless of how eager they are to try one.
Prerequisites for Learning
A handspring isn’t a beginner skill. Before attempting one, you need three things: strength, flexibility, and body control. Specifically, that means being able to hold a straight handstand for several seconds, push up into a full bridge with open shoulders, and demonstrate enough leg power to jump backward with commitment. Shoulder flexibility matters because your arms need to reach a fully extended overhead position at the moment your hands contact the ground. If your shoulders can’t get there, other joints compensate in ways that increase injury risk.
Most gyms use shaped training equipment to help athletes learn the motion safely. Octagonal mats (often called “octagons”) and purpose-built trainers like barrel-shaped blocks support the athlete’s back through the rotation, letting them feel the movement pattern before doing it independently. These tools are designed to roll only when the athlete transfers weight correctly, reinforcing proper timing rather than just flinging them over.
Why Wrist and Shoulder Health Matter
The wrist is the most frequently injured upper extremity joint in female gymnasts, and handsprings are a major contributor. Every time your hands hit the ground during a back handspring, your wrists absorb your full body weight while bent backward. If the wrist is hyperextended at impact, force concentrates on a small area of the forearm bones, increasing stress on the growth plates in younger athletes.
What’s interesting is that wrist injuries during handsprings often start at the shoulder. Research published in the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy found that the angle of the shoulder at hand contact directly correlates with the angle of the wrist. When a gymnast’s shoulders don’t reach full overhead extension at impact, the wrists compensate by bending further back. Strengthening the muscles around the shoulder blade and improving shoulder flexibility can reduce wrist hyperextension during the skill, potentially preventing chronic problems down the road.
For younger gymnasts whose bones are still growing, repeated wrist stress can cause a condition where the growth plate of the radius (the larger forearm bone) slows or stops growing. This changes the alignment of the two forearm bones and can lead to complex injuries requiring surgery later in life. In skeletally mature athletes, the same repetitive forces tend to cause cartilage tears and bone impingement instead. Either way, the message is the same: proper shoulder mechanics during handsprings protect far more than just the shoulders.