About Me

My name is Jonathan, and I'm a much better hand balancer than self-biographer, which is fortunate, because if the latter was my job, I would be unemployed. Luckily, I grew up doing gymnastics and trained it enough to compete and do well at a national level. I later moved onto parkour, in which I actually kept using handstands, in no small part because everyone kept giving me challenges with handstands in them. I then left my home to travel and explore new possibilities, living outside and training parkour a bit everywhere until I arrived in Vancouver with about $50 in my pocket.

That's how I came to use my skills for busking on the street, and how I ended up being asked to work for a local circus. At this point, I started focusing more on hand balancing, but it wasn't until 2012 that I started focusing on hand balancing exclusively. As I progressed, finding enough time to practice was no easy task, and in 2018, I ended up moving back to Montreal for 3 years so that I could train more.

As a coach, my experience officially started in 2010, as I started teaching people at the Vancouver Circus School, as well as at a gym named Project Warrior, and outdoors. Unofficially, I had already been occasionally coaching people for gymnastics many years before that, but I started really developing my coaching skills as I was given more responsibility at the circus school and as more people started requesting my help for their handstands, and over the years, I became one of the most knowledgeable people around on that topic.

My coaching style is calm and focused, and one of my biggest strengths is my eye for body mechanics, which I have developed over nearly 30 years spent observing others move, and feeling my own movement. As young gymnasts, my teammates and I were regularly asked by our coach to identify each others' mistakes, and to explain those mistakes and cue each other to do better, so that we could apply those same corrections to ourselves. The habit is now imbedded in me, and I find explaining in detail what we are doing to my students, and why we are doing it, crucial to them developing the accuracy of what I call their mental physics engine.

In terms of exercises and training focus, I tend to emphasize a majority of exercises that my students can do on their own, and much of my early efforts are geared towards them executing the exercises well and with the right intent. I alternate between nitpicking on quality, and letting my students try things and feel the results for themselves, so as to let them experience a wide variety of sensations and help them develop better body awareness.

While I am quite methodical in my approach to developing handstands, I also like to ask people to try things I think are safe to try, see how it goes, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and figure out drills to help fix their weaknesses. Nearly every exercise I prescribe to a student, I discovered by seeing someone needing it. My most prescribed drills also happen to be the ones I think are most commonly needed based on my observations.

All in all, this makes me a useful asset to those in need of solving handstand problems, and it is always a pleasure to do so.