Physics in a handstand

I’ve done a blog on the physics involved in doing a shoulder freeze before, but this time I’m going to talk about the physics involved in doing a handstand. In both break dancing moves, you kick your legs up into the air and have to balance by keeping them as perpendicular to the ground as possible. When I was learning how to do a handstand this past Tuesday in break dancing class, physics popped into my head when the teacher was explaining something to me. When you do a handstand you kick up one leg and then the other, and similarly, when you go back down, you put one leg back down and then the other. One time, I made the mistake of kicking both legs back down at the same time, and my teacher told me to make sure I put them down one after the other because it gives you more balance and less impact on the ground. That made me think of the concepts of momentum and impulse. If you kicked both legs back down at the same time, that would produce a much greater force than if you put them down separately. Force is equal to mass times acceleration, so when you put two legs down at the same time, your mass and acceleration are bigger, yielding a greater force. With a greater force comes a bigger impulse and more momentum too since impulse is equal to momentum.