Topic: 10-15 foot Drops....

[Sat Santokh]

ok i get THAT...that it will but come on 6ft that is too little

...It's really not.  A three foot drop generates 600lbs of force onto the legs with perfect landing, and over double that with sloppy technique.  Performed poorly, that goes straight into your knees.  And I have to ask, anyhow, can you squat 600lbs?  Sorry, but I wouldn't recommend anything higher than waist height for the first two years of training.

Um I'm sorry but where are you getting that information from?  Ryan and I have used force plates in the biomechanics lab here at the University of Colorado and with proper landing technique you can easily drop the amount of force to much less than 600.  I'm sorry I don't remember exactly how much it was but for me it was closer to 125 or so (I weigh 145)  Every traceur we brought in there could pretty much get their force to be under 1 g.

[Samuel96]

ok i get THAT...that it will but come on 6ft that is too little

...It's really not.  A three foot drop generates 600lbs of force onto the legs with perfect landing, and over double that with sloppy technique.  Performed poorly, that goes straight into your knees.  And I have to ask, anyhow, can you squat 600lbs?  Sorry, but I wouldn't recommend anything higher than waist height for the first two years of training.

Um I'm sorry but where are you getting that information from?  Ryan and I have used force plates in the biomechanics lab here at the University of Colorado and with proper landing technique you can easily drop the amount of force to much less than 600.  I'm sorry I don't remember exactly how much it was but for me it was closer to 125 or so (I weigh 145)  Every traceur we brought in there could pretty much get their force to be under 1 g.

Yeah... I knew he wasn't right but I don't know the formula. What is the formula?

[Andy Animus Tran]

Um I'm sorry but where are you getting that information from?  Ryan and I have used force plates in the biomechanics lab here at the University of Colorado and with proper landing technique you can easily drop the amount of force to much less than 600.  I'm sorry I don't remember exactly how much it was but for me it was closer to 125 or so (I weigh 145)  Every traceur we brought in there could pretty much get their force to be under 1 g.

Sat, that was pulled from the experiment Dan did in Toronto with force plates that inspired Ryan's more complete experiments.  Since it's been at least a year since I've seen that post, I could be mixing up the numbers and the 600lbs could be with improper technique.

It could've been around 400lbs for proper technique, and that'd be a total count, not an extra count (which is what I assume your 125 is)..  So with a 200lb person (which Dan is around), slightly under an extra 200 would be close to 400lbs.

The point is that the generated force is rather massive.

Sam, what formula are you talking about...?  The technique is going to completely alter the measurements, which means any formula is dependent on musculature and a bit of randomness (i.e. impossible to create a proper formula unless you  have human robots who can do the EXACT same landing every time).  If you're just talking about gravity, we accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second.

[bioobird]

i guarantee you its not 15 feet high. without even looking at it. people have NO concept of how high things are. 15 feet is WAY higher then you think it is. and for taking huge drops, its not about technique or stregnth its mainly about conditioning,  you have to work up to it. you cant just one day "get 15 foot drops"

and any idiot can jump off of something. now it take a real traecur to actually land.

[bioobird]

and that 3 feet 600 pounds stuff isn't accurate. the factors that contribute to a number like that are all over the board. how much you weigh being the biggest issue. and how your landing technique is. cause people reach for the ground and apply force as there body gets closer. but to just say EVERYBODY who jumps from 3 feet will generate 600 pounds of force upon impact... now thats just silly...

[Andy Animus Tran]

and that 3 feet 600 pounds stuff isn't accurate. the factors that contribute to a number like that are all over the board. how much you weigh being the biggest issue. and how your landing technique is. cause people reach for the ground and apply force as there body gets closer. but to just say EVERYBODY who jumps from 3 feet will generate 600 pounds of force upon impact... now thats just silly...

Hush you.  Scare tactics are more effective.

At absolute best, you're going to generate .75 times your bodyweight extra..  At worst, probably a little under triple.  At three feet, that is.

[bioobird]

hehehe. your right.  id rather scare them into just avoiding the big drops all together. well, until there ready

[Matthew Wang]

Guys i don't mean to sound careless, but this is getting waaay too detailed. "don't jump off things more than 3 feet" or "6 feet should be max" or even "...600 pounds is a lot...". It not about what you WANT to jump off. It's what you think you will NEED to jump off. If you think you shouldn't do more than 3 feet for your first year of training, so be it. If you think you can do any height as long as you practice LOTS and LOTS and develope the proper techniques to keep yourself safe, that's ok too.

Whatever you do just remember that you MAY HAVE TO JUMP FROM A HIGH HEIGHT. Or you might not. If you believe that slow and steady wins the race then train slow and smartly. If you think you need to be able to drop from extreme heights then go ahead. If you kill yourself that's your fault. But if you train smartly and hard you should be ok.

[hardcoretraceur]

train smartly? how many 13 year olds know a damn thing about the integrity of their body.

train for life, don't do anything that isn't making you stronger.

[Dalton A]

train smartly? how many 13 year olds know a damn thing about the integrity of their body.

train for life, don't do anything that isn't making you stronger.

Amen to that. 

And triggahappy, even ignoring the fact that almost no 13 year old (who are pretty much the only people who would do this stuff) would know enough about their body integrity, it still doesn't give them a reason.  For example, I study martial arts, and I MIGHT have to kill somebody someday in defense.  But that doesn't mean I go out and kill people just because I might have to.  I know I can, because as Animus put it, I've conditioned for it SAFELY.

And wow, that sounded awfully conceited of me with the killing part.    I apologize.  That was just the best example I could think of.

[joekk]

thx bio birrd...tha is not right you have to jump off of like a 2 story building to get that much weight...

[Matthew Wang]

I just said train smartly, which means safely, which means it SHOULD make you stronger and better overall. But look at it how you want, the 13 year olds who die from not training smartly...well that's their fault.

[Bryan Augstein]

thx bio birrd...tha is not right you have to jump off of like a 2 story building to get that much weight...

Wrong. Please don't talk about things you really have no clue about. Especially when the information is indirectly related to someone's safety.

[Jereme Sanders]

I just said train smartly, which means safely, which means it SHOULD make you stronger and better overall. But look at it how you want, the 13 year olds who die from not training smartly...well that's their fault.

It's the Parkour Communities fault as a whole for not helping that kid sooner actually, because whether we take responsibility or not Parkour would be held accountable, not the kid, not the parents, not the fall, Parkour would be responsible. Which is exactly the kind of publicity we DON'T need, which is why we try and keep new people from doing big drops, solely for the fact that yes is does do some damage no matter how strong or good your technique is and yes there is a higher chance of injury. Parkour is very new in America and its up to all of us to keep spreading it in a good light, things like 13 year olds jumping off of high things, even if they don't injury themselves, training for "weeks" or whatever to do the jump (which everyone should know is nowhere near enough time) , just gives people the wrong idea about what we do all together. Whether we like it our not its our responsibility to spread Parkour, while we may not think much about it our actions can and will have definite repercussions for our future and future generations.

Keep Training Safely

[Patrick Yang]

It's the Parkour Communities fault as a whole for not helping that kid sooner actually, because whether we take responsibility or not Parkour would be held accountable, not the kid, not the parents, not the fall, Parkour would be responsible. Which is exactly the kind of publicity we DON'T need, which is why we try and keep new people from doing big drops, solely for the fact that yes is does do some damage no matter how strong or good your technique is and yes there is a higher chance of injury. Parkour is very new in America and its up to all of us to keep spreading it in a good light, things like 13 year olds jumping off of high things, even if they don't injury themselves, training for "weeks" or whatever to do the jump (which everyone should know is nowhere near enough time) , just gives people the wrong idea about what we do all together. Whether we like it our not its our responsibility to spread Parkour, while we may not think much about it our actions can and will have definite repercussions for our future and future generations.

Agreed.  It's not only a disservice to the parkour community and an individual practitioner to advocate practicing jumps above his conditioning level, but it's also a disservice to all future students of the discipline.  The myth that jumping off roofs is cool and safe after a few weeks of training is prevalent among those just discovering the art of movement.  It is part of the culture, due to action movies and the overhyping media.  But the biggest problem is that there is a large library of videos of people calling themselves traceurs and free runners doing just that: jumping off of things far too high, far too early.  (And with bad form!)

The mindset perpetuates the culture; the culture perpetuates the mindset.  This is why every person who says it's okay to jump off of high things early in his career, every video that shows some 13 year old kid leaping from his roof to chronic knee discomfort, every instance where we hold our tongues and hope they learn for themselves adds to our troubles in the future.  Every kid we allow others to watch jumping off buildings will help ingrain into the minds of the public and newcomers that this is okay to do.  And the public and newcomers is where our voice is heard the least, where they don't have the luxury of 40,757 practitioners (as of this writing) yelling at them not to do this kind of thing.  It's our responsibility to correct this error in parkour culture now, before it gets even more out of hand.

[Sam Zytka]

in my community everyone really knows about parkour and im the only one who trains it, but it is so annoying because like ive heard kids yell, "dude look at me im doing parkour" towards me and then they jump off like an 8 foot roof and roll around as if they are on fire.  I always just yell back "look im not destroying my knees" and keep walking

[Spencer B]

I have taken a 14 fall onto unpadded gymnasium floor, and a 15 foot fall off of my roof onto grass. The last time I did either of these was several months ago and I don't plan to do them again, EVER. I didn't hurt myself, luckily, but the fear that I could was there and looking back I feel like an idiot for taking such high drops because I could have hurt myself very easily. Since then I have confined myself to what I am comfortable with barefoot, as someone said earlier, minus some height which means drops no higher than five feet onto any surface, which is RARE. Point is dropping isn't fun. It looks cool, but it doesn't feel cool, and more than likely you will want to avoid big drops like that in the future.

Try this as an alternative: Practice vaults, flow, and rolling constantly, and if you're comfortable with it some more avanced stuff, then go out and just run. Don't stop, just...flow. I guarantee you that doing this will feel much greater than jumping of a roof. And MUCH cooler.

[strelok]

The biggest fall I've taken probably didn't stem from parkour. I've taken 10+ feet falls onto a crash pad, and sometimes just onto the ground, in climbing shoes - which hurts a lot =) (I've been rock climbing for 6+ years). In parkour, I've mostly stayed below 6-8ft, since more is simply not necessary. First, I think that the rolling technique has to be perfected. Once you have the roll down, and quite a bit of conditioning, I think that you can choose for yourself whether or not to do higher drops. I am pro-choice in that regard.

I know the criticism of the parkour majority, and I've read dozens of topics such as this in the past half a year. However, I don't think that telling people not to do stuff isn't going to restrict them from doing it in the future. As a famous Russian proverb says : "A smart man learns from the mistakes of others, while a dumb one only learns from his own". You can tell someone one million times to not jump off of height X or Y or Z, but if they think that it would be invaluable to their social standing or to the respect that it gains them in school/college, they will still do it.

Sorry for my ramblings. I am a pessimist at heart, so I always try to look from the worse side. If things are not as bad, there's one more reason to celebrate. =)

-Pasha

[Holland Wilson]

I make it a policy to fall no more than my height. I know this isn't a terribly good guide, because as your mass decreases the distance you can fall increases because the force from the fall decreases faster than the amount of weight your body can stand does, but all I know of physics and anatomy indicates that it's a manageable fall and good technique will leave little strain that my body can't fix on its own. I also make it a policy not to fall my height on a regular basis. I can practice landings just fine dropping from two or three feet, and maybe if I'm feeling thrill-happy I'll toss in a jump at height onto grass.

[Alex L.]

Try this as an alternative: Practice vaults, flow, and rolling constantly, and if you're comfortable with it some more avanced stuff, then go out and just run. Don't stop, just...flow. I guarantee you that doing this will feel much greater than jumping of a roof. And MUCH cooler.

Yeah you're right. I feel everytime i'm out and i'm just weaving through obstacles fluently I feel great