The most valuable lesson I ever learned from martial arts was how to fall down without hurting myself, and I’d say this is a skill that would help most people significantly reduce the number and severity of physical injuries they experience over their lifetime.
Tangential point: breakfall is the exact wrong thing to do if you’ve lost your balance while jumping on a trampoline—found that one out the hard way. But really this comment should be filed under Cached Thoughts.
That’s interesting. Is that a consequence of your holistic knowledge of martial arts or a single technique that could be taught on its own? Can the technique be taught e.g. to elderly people who are not in good shape?
It’s actually a corpus of techniques that can be taught separately from the rest of the martial arts syllabus. Collectively they are called “breakfall”.
ETA:
Can the technique be taught e.g. to elderly people who are not in good shape?
There are very gentle intro exercises which involve starting from a seated position; however, it’s conceivable that a sufficiently frail person might not be able to manage even those.
The knowledge is basically muscle memory: we didn’t spend a lot of time learning the formal breakfall techniques, so much as every class involved falling or being knocked over from a variety of awkward positions, on the order of 100 times per class. So although it might be possible to teach the elderly the techniques (Cyan sounds like ey knows more about this than I do), the way I learned them probably wouldn’t be a good way to do it.
I have found the experience transferrable, though, to situations like skiing, slipping on icy ground, crashing my bike, etc.
The most valuable lesson I ever learned from martial arts was how to fall down without hurting myself, and I’d say this is a skill that would help most people significantly reduce the number and severity of physical injuries they experience over their lifetime.
Tangential point: breakfall is the exact wrong thing to do if you’ve lost your balance while jumping on a trampoline—found that one out the hard way. But really this comment should be filed under Cached Thoughts.
That’s interesting. Is that a consequence of your holistic knowledge of martial arts or a single technique that could be taught on its own? Can the technique be taught e.g. to elderly people who are not in good shape?
It’s actually a corpus of techniques that can be taught separately from the rest of the martial arts syllabus. Collectively they are called “breakfall”.
ETA:
There are very gentle intro exercises which involve starting from a seated position; however, it’s conceivable that a sufficiently frail person might not be able to manage even those.
Intro judo classes emphasize safe falling quite a bit. I have no idea if anyone teaches judo to elderly people, though.
The knowledge is basically muscle memory: we didn’t spend a lot of time learning the formal breakfall techniques, so much as every class involved falling or being knocked over from a variety of awkward positions, on the order of 100 times per class. So although it might be possible to teach the elderly the techniques (Cyan sounds like ey knows more about this than I do), the way I learned them probably wouldn’t be a good way to do it.
I have found the experience transferrable, though, to situations like skiing, slipping on icy ground, crashing my bike, etc.