Falling All Over Ourselves
We humans tend to walk on two legs, which works out well most of the time. Walking is great: it’s efficient and pleasant and we can chew gum, talk on our phones (stop it) or point at birds and snap our fingers while we’re doing it because we only need 2 legs to walk, not 4. But we give up some stability by only using 2 legs, and since we’re “walking upright” like a bunch of showoffs, most of our body is at a significantly higher altitude than our legs.
Sometimes we fall over, or trip. Or are tripped by mischievous... well, never mind. We sometimes lose our balance and fall. This isn’t that dangerous most of the time, except when you see something like this:
(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
See Aaron Rodgers? (The guy with the yellow helmet) He’s being tackled at high speed. He’s lost his balance and he’s going to fall all the way to the ground—no doubt about it. He has also instinctively put out his left hand to stop his body plus the considerable mass of the other human body on top of him. It’s pretty stressful for Aaron’s wrist, elbow and shoulder joint and all the bones in between.
Sometimes when people do this (without even being tackled) break some of the bones in their arm. It might be a strength-to-weight ratio thing, or it might be because our arms were really developed for hanging from tree branches, but it doesn’t matter—our arms suck for stopping our bodies from falling when we stick them straight out.
However, there is a set of remarkable techniques for addressing this very problem.
The woman in blue is going to impact the ground very soon and very forcefully. Notice she is paying attention to how far away the ground is and NOT trying to stick her left hand out to stop this from happening. The arts of Jujutsu and Judo teach ukemi-waza or break falls: how to be tripped, thrown, swept off your feet—and survive. The thing that these techniques all have in common is that 1) you DON’T put your hand down to try to stop yourself from getting closer to the ground and 2) you DO tilt your head away from the ground. They also teach you to try to land on a large part of your body to absorb the impact better and to slap the ground with your hand and arm. (Curiously, slapping may be taught simply to occupy your arm with a harmless activity that prevents you from doing something stupid with it, like sticking it straight out toward an appointment with an ambulance or Emergency Room.)
Overcoming the instinctive urge to reach for the ground requires considerable practice, but I think it would be interesting if more people did. There are a fair number of emergency room visits for people with broken collarbones that might be avoided, like my mom who stumbled and “caught” herself a while back, or another friend who damaged tendons and ligaments in her shoulder while trying to catch herself from falling backwards. (“Fall On Outstretched Hand” or FOOSH is a common emergency room term.)
I had a close call quite a few years ago myself when, on a crisp Winter morning I stepped down off of a cement step onto a sidewalk, not realizing that it was glare ice. My feet shot straight out across the ice and the rest of me followed quickly in a downward arc after a moment of weightlessness that seemed both very long and all too brief. That cement step stayed in place. I don’t know exactly how close my head came to the step or the icy sidewalk, but the break falls I had been practicing for the previous 10 years paid handsome dividends: I tucked my head toward my chest and slapped the ground with my arms instead of sticking my arms back behind me toward the ice that had just tried to assassinate me.
The practice of break falls definitely might not work at scale, because we’re really not comfortable rolling around on the ground as we get older, much less deliberately doing something we avoid at all costs: suddenly meeting the Earth on gravity’s terms. But what if we started as children and then... just didn’t stop?