High falls, hard falls, break falls…
Just the names conjure up tension. I have fun practicing them, and am improving (softer/safer). But I also end up with some interesting bruises and sore spots now and then, from doing them in a slappy, braced, breath-holding, brute-force-ish kind of way.
We go about learning to do them in a relaxed, easy way, but at some point between the working up to them and the doing them my brain flips from “swoosh” to “wham!”
A few days ago when one of our instructors said we were going to work on high falls (Yay!) a fellow student jokingly suggested that we should “work on low falls instead.”
Huh… I think I like that idea!
The point isn’t to get lots of air, it’s to land comfortably, with as little impact as possible. Keep (or get) your head low to the mat. Reach over and touch the mat as you rotate into rolling down softly. No “wham!”
Thinking of them as “low falls” takes a little of the edge off, and is a handy reminder that the idea is to get low, not high.
I think I’ll call them low falls from now on.
