M2M Day 102: Mom, please don’t watch this video
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For February, my goal is to land a backflip.
Today, I landed on my head.
It actually wasn’t so bad, especially because it was on a very padded mat and because most of my body weight was on my arms.
Here’s the video (which features two ugly backflip attempts).
Before this video, I executed 45 backflips (in the harness), where I landed on my feet. They weren’t the best backflips ever, but they got the job done. In fact, my coach, Elijah, gave me no assistance on most of them (at least, not physically; mentally, wearing the harness is a big deal).
As a result, I had enough confidence to try without the harness.
While I consciously didn’t feel scared, clearly I was, because I totally bailed out twice, resulting in the upside-down landing.
Other than these unintentional headstands, the rest of the lesson went quite well. I spent most of the time throwing backflip after backflip, in order to continue reminding my brain that falling backwards is an acceptable thing to do.
The backflips weren’t perfect, but I did manage to correct my asymmetry from Lesson 2, as well as reduce the amount I’m whipping my head backwards.
I also started to better understand the way my body moves, and could predict how the flip would look on video even before watching it. This is an important step, considering my initial (and continued) struggle with body awareness.
Here’s a montage of some of today’s flips.
In the video, you can see that I’m barely tucking. Instead, I’m just whipping my feet around. In my next lesson on Tuesday, now that I’m jumping a bit more upright, I need to focus on a quicker and more powerful tuck.
In the spirit of “battle wounds”, it’s also worth quickly mentioning today’s warm up exercise.
As warm up, Elijah had me practice back drop pullovers on the trampoline, in order to help me practice driving me knees over my head. This move is supposed to simulate the tuck of the backflip, but in a theoretically more controlled environment.
I’m no so sure I found it “more controlled” though, and ended up with a lot of trampoline burn on my arms and back.
Nevertheless, there is something oddly satisfying about these battle wounds. If anything, they are visual reminders that I’m playing outside my comfort zone, which is sort of the point of this month’s challenge: How can I create a controlled environment that allows me to safely address and overcome a major physical fear?
So far, while challenging, I’ve really enjoyed trying to answer this question.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
