3. Learning to fall, and falling to learn.
Video Transcript
Don’t jump off your board
The first rule of falling is – do not jump off your skateboard.
The first instinct when you experience a loss of balance is to jump off your skateboard. You must train yourself to overcome this instinct for three reasons.
Firstly to prevent injury. The skateboard’s design has changed over the years to keep it under your feet. The grip tape, the concave, the nose and tail.
The skate shoe has also evolved, with vulcanised rubber on the sole, is designed to ‘stick’ to the skateboard. [take off shoe, place on board and tip the board, showing how the shoe ’sticks’]
When you jump off your board, you are doing something the board has not been designed for. This can lead to injury.
Secondly, what happens when you make a mistake on a skateboard.
You fall over.
Yes, you fall over, and, how do you get better at things? Yes, by doing them. Yes, the more we fall, the better we get at it. The best skaters are stunt men. They’ve learnt how to fall, and not hurt themselves.
When you fall, think about how the quality of the fall. Was it a good fall – i.e. did you hurt yourself? No – good fall. Yes. Bad fall. Must do better.
What else happens when you make a mistake?
You learn – yes correct
Yes, we don’t step off the board because you shortcut the learning process
Understand the learning process
To know the right way to do something, we have to know the wrong way to do something first.
To learn effectively we need to understand the learning process. The learning process is circular:
- Experiment
- Mistake
- Learn
- Experiment
- Make mistake
- Etc
It’s really important to make mistakes. If you are not making mistakes you are not learning. We are hard-wired to believe making mistakes is wrong, when in actual fact, it’s right. We need to do it to get better.
Practice the safety stance
There is an important relationship between danger and proximity to the ground. If we fall and we are standing up straight, we are going to fall, like tree falling when it’s cut down. It crashes. If we are close to the ground, we are going to roll.
How close you are to the ground should depend on how much danger you are in. As a beginner, you should have your knees bent, i.e. our riding stance that we learnt earlier. The safest position is when you are close to the ground, with your hands out.
Bend with your knees, not with your back. Even if you have all your safety gear on, your backside is unprotected. If you fall on it, it’s going to hurt. By keeping it close to the ground, we are protecting it.
Practice keeping your balance
You should always try and stay on your board. Let’s imagine we’re losing our balance. We’ll move down into a safe seated position. How do we keep our balance here? I always say, use the ‘handlebars’ – what can we grab hold of to stabilise?
Yes, the floor. We can use the floor to stabilise.
This isn’t just for beginners. You can also see the pro’s using this technique. Look at Jaws conquering the Lyon 25 stairset. Look at Tony Hawk making a 900 aged 48. Their hands hits the floor, balance is regained, and they roll away, trick made.
So, let’s drill this. Let’s go down, hit the floor with your wrist guards, and stand back up. OK, again, up down, stabilise. Let’s practice putting our hands down in front, behind, to each side.
The wrist guards are the most important part of your kit. If you invest in one piece of safety equipment, buy good wrist guards.
Learn controlled falling
Lastly, if we can’t get our balance back whilst in our safety stance, and stay on our board, we need to do a controlled fall.
Take your weight on your hands, lower your hips to the floor.
Try and keep your feet on the skateboard.
Takeaways
- Don’t jump off your skateboard
- Wear your wrist guards
- Mistakes are right, if you’re not falling over you’re doing something wrong
- Practice falling. It’s the only way you’ll get better at it.
- Use your hands to get your balance back.
The main takeaway from this lesson is ‘Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies (i.e. the ground) closer..
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