During my daughter’s soccer season, I witnessed an athlete fall and get a concussion.  I witnessed two other athletes fall and break their wrists.  Last year, we had three athletes that fell breaking their wrist (only one while actually training at our place – accidents happen).  You start to fall and automatically reach behind you to brace your fall.

So, it got me to thinking (which can be a scary thing sometimes), maybe we need to teach these athletes how to fall properly to avoid injuring themselves.

Back in the day, I took a Korean martial art called Hapkido.  We would learn practical self-defense involving joint locks, pressure points, and how to fall.

We spent our first couple sessions going over falls.  If you get pushed back how do you land?  If you fall to the side, how are you landing?

It was important to continue to train how to fall so it would become instinctive.  We didn’t want to have it happen in real life and we land on our head.

The key points that I remembered were this:

  • If you start falling straight back, you want to tuck your chin to your chest. This will help protect your head and prevent it from flopping back loosely.
  • If you can, immediately as you start to fall bend your knees to reduce the height of impact and almost sit into the fall.
  • As you start to land, you want to simultaneously smack your arms and hands to the ground to help dissipate the force and minimize the shock.
  • If you fall at an angle, try not to land on the hip because that is easy to do. Try to roll onto the back, still smacking the arms down at the same time (palms down).

Don’t you think this could be valuable for your athlete?

The one girl I saw break her wrist was put in an uncontrollable position and she was falling fast.  It was no wonder she snapped her wrist.  She immediately grabbed it.  I was amazed she didn’t get a concussion based on how hard her head also hit the surface.  If she had done the above prevention quickly, I don’t think it would have happened.

Kids aren’t as tough as they used to be.  Not literally, but the bones aren’t as tough, the ligaments aren’t as tough, and that could be due to the nutrition they are taking in or not taking in.

But, learning how to fall might be a huge lifesaver preventing them from getting injured and not missing time for rehab and doing what you want to do, play games.