Speaking of handstands, I've been wanting to get started with that too as an item on my skills-to-acquire list. Any tips for a fellow beginner? I could never seem to get past the point needed to balance. I kick my body back and it stop right before the balance point and my body slowly goes off center and comes crashing down. Have you found it easier to do with trying to keep your body straight and stiff or feet tucked in a bit? Is it easier to learn with using your head against the ground or going for it with your arms straight? Any supplemental exercises or methods that you've found have helped?
As someone who's spent more than the last year trying to learn handstands as an adult, they're seriously hard. I don't know how long you've been practising, but I totally underestimated how long it would take me to balance one. I was starting from being pretty out of shape and I'd never done anything like this before, and I'm also tall (6'4"/194cm) which makes it harder, but I see people talking about timeframes of 6 months to a year minimum of training them seriously (say 20-30 mins 4x a week or more) to have a chance at kicking up into a free balancing handstand for, say, 15-20 seconds. It has taken me way longer than that, but I'm now up to ~30 sec holds but still with pretty terrible consistency (i.e. I get a couple of good holds and a few more shorter ones a day out of ~20 attempts).
For where it sounds like you're at, I totally recommend Yuri Marmerstein's Vimeo series here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/handstandbalance/249766384. Not free but cheap and very good. The basic requirements are being comfortable bailing, and being able to hold a half-decent chest to wall handstand.
re: body tension, it depends what you're planning to achieve. For just handbalancing you actually don't need a lot of tension, just enough that you're not flopping around all over the place. Most of the information online that talks about buns & core of steel comes from gymnastics, where the tension is used to generate force when tumbling. Most people from a handbalancing background no longer recommend tons of ab work (i.e. dish/hollow body) since it's not really required. You will need tons of trapezius and forearm strength though, working those was really a game changer for me.
