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Thread: More Harder to Kill Evidence

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by Matt James View Post
    I'm not going to get in the middle of y'all's regularly scheduled learning to fall debate. Simply pointing out that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and walking through a train platform while staring at one's phone is an inherently risky proposition. QED.
    Well, there is that.

  2. #22
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    The responses by some of us is due to a topic a few months back about better (softer) flooring at hospitals and nursing homes. The topic of “learning to fall correctly” was brought up then and some of us remember that thread. Lot of opinions on that one.

    Some of us find it impossible to imagine that teaching most populations how to fall correctly is a fools errand. Especially in the context of the elderly. It never ends well. I know this because my mother is in a nursing home( not from a fall).
    I see it every day.

    And any time spent teaching someone how to fall correctly sounds good in isolation. But that is time spent not teaching other things, time being a limited resource. Should a PT cut back on gross motor skills or fine motor skills therapy? Or in the poster’s case, less time under the bar and more time spent practicing falling correctly?

  3. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    What happens when you teach an 80-year-old woman how to fall, Andrew? Laying down on the floor is not falling -- what Gadders did is falling. Can you teach her anything about this without actually having her fall? And what happens when she falls that first time? And even the second or the third time while you're teaching her to fall? Good things? Do good things happen that first time she falls before our Far Eastern Martial Arts Sensei has successfully perfected her falling skills? No. Good things do not happen to 80-year-old women when they fall down. Even if they fall down on the soft fuzzy mat in the Dojo where Senseis teach Far Eastern Martial Arts. It takes about 0.2 seconds to fall, if even that long, and had his feet gone forward instead of sideways, he could easily have fractured his posterior skull. Happens all the time -- ask the ER guys in states where there's ice on the ground -- because when you slip and fall you are BY DEFINITION not in control of the movement, you don't know it's about to happen (like you do in The Far Eastern Dojo), and if you happen to fall backwards you cannot react in time to affect the outcome because your arms and legs -- the part of your body mass you can control quickly -- are out in front of you, in the air, on the way down. And the time spent teaching the 80-year-old woman this incredibly valuable skill could have more productively been spent getting her stronger, so she isn't as likely to fall. Of all the silly shit Mark "Every Post is a Vocabulary Lesson" Hurling has said over the years, this has got to be the King Hell silliest thing he's ever said, and I'm afraid somebody is going to believe him. Sorry, but this is ridiculous, and you ought to know better.
    You're inferring a lot about what I said that isn't true.

    I will try to clarify. If, as you bring up, an 80 year old woman came to me because she had fallen and does not want to fall again, I would get her as strong as I could and never mention learning how to fall.

    You can argue there's a priority of resources, but to say that creating a reflex in the event of a fall is a waste of time is just wrong. And again, I'm not saying it has to be done one or the other, which you have implied multiple times.
    You've also implied that control of the body has to be conscious and deliberate which it doesn't. Fake punch a guy in the head and see what his hands do. They'll do something, and he certainly didn't plan it consciously. Why is that? And why do kickboxers do something different from an untrained individual?

    And yes, you can teach someone how to do something without them directly performing the identical action. Same as you can get someone's 1RM squat to go up without ever having them do a 1RM.

    To be clear, if anyone is reading this thinking "I need to push my grandma down so she can learn how to fall," don't do that.
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  4. #24
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    My spousal unit saw a young guy probably late 20s a few years ago fall outside a bagel shop in Studio City. The guy walks out of the shop and slips on a smear of cream cheese on the tile flooring. Went straight down backwards and cracked the back of his skull hard. He was caught completely by surprise and was completely knocked out. When the paramedics got there in a few minutes he could see their reaction. No bueno.

  5. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by AndrewLewis View Post
    You're inferring a lot about what I said that isn't true.

    I will try to clarify. If, as you bring up, an 80 year old woman came to me because she had fallen and does not want to fall again, I would get her as strong as I could and never mention learning how to fall.

    You can argue there's a priority of resources, but to say that creating a reflex in the event of a fall is a waste of time is just wrong. And again, I'm not saying it has to be done one or the other, which you have implied multiple times.
    You've also implied that control of the body has to be conscious and deliberate which it doesn't. Fake punch a guy in the head and see what his hands do. They'll do something, and he certainly didn't plan it consciously. Why is that? And why do kickboxers do something different from an untrained individual?

    And yes, you can teach someone how to do something without them directly performing the identical action. Same as you can get someone's 1RM squat to go up without ever having them do a 1RM.

    To be clear, if anyone is reading this thinking "I need to push my grandma down so she can learn how to fall," don't do that.
    Just in case this wasn't clear, I wasn't talking to you.

  6. #26
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    I used to fall before I trained. I never had any problem getting right back up. Have you considered using proper situational awareness?

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    I find it funny Mark Hurling is commenting in this thread when that's what should have been done at the station.

    Oh yea, glad you're ok. This is one of the reasons I (just turned 48, also) still train at all costs, especially when we get elderly this is gonna count big time. And yes, people have been killed falling backwards. It was good you didn't hit the corner of that guard rail, too. When a teen I was horse playing in the house, was running, and slipped on a rug while trying to make a sharp turn. I went down and a rib landed right into the sharp corner of the piano, bearing the weight of everything else. It of course broke and that didn't feel good.

  8. #28
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    Gadders im glad you're okay. I can state definitively that strength training has saved me injury in a similar situation. I was leaving work via a set of concrete steps. The area at the top was covered in clear ice (i do watch where im walking) and my feet shot up hitting the beginning of the railing and my body flew backward onto the gym bag strapped across my back from training that day. 100 percent training saved me from a cracked skull that day.

  9. #29
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    Thread summary broken down sequentially and logically:

    1. Man slipped on vomit in train station and fell down into the vomit. Hilarious.

    2. Martial arts instructor on a strength forum has been advocating to train the elderly to fall correctly for months. Not sure if he is completely serious or not, but he actually may view opposition to elderly fall training as an affront to martial arts in general.

    3. Good things do not happen to 80-year-old women when they fall down - Rip

    4. It appears good things also do not happen to 20 year old men who fall down unexpectedly.

    5. Strength has made him harder to kill in the event of a fall.

    6. ...He probably should have been a martial arts expert too, just to provide more protection against falls.

    7 ...And he should have grown up slipping on ice, like those of us who are truly good at falling; ice is nature's way of training falls and evolutionarily selecting against people who reflexively fall incorrectly.

  10. #30
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    Quote Originally Posted by AndrewLewis View Post
    Everyone falls once in a while. Having an ingrained habit of falling in a way that disperses the force is a good thing.

    BJJ has saved me more times from ice than from being in a fight.
    I can confirm what this man is saying. I recall one incident in particular that should have ended with my face meeting pavement if we didn’t drill forward rolls at the start of every damn fundamentals class.

    Royler Gracie likes to tell a story at seminars about how his dad Helio, when he was in his 80s, tripped and fell on the street, forward rolled right back up on his feet and kept walking like nothing ever happened. Doubt this is something you can safely train an elderly person to do though - it has to be drilled and ingrained during a younger, more resilient state of health.

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