M2M Day 109: He’s only holding onto my shirt

Max Deutsch
2 min readFeb 18, 2017

--

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 went to my fifth backflip lesson, and I’m super happy with my progress. As I promised (to myself) yesterday, I attempted a backflip on the ground, without the harness.

But, before I did that, I strapped into the harness to warm up and gain some confidence.

Once I was comfortable in the harness, I took the harness off and Elijah came over to spot me. Essentially, Elijah just held my shirt, which wouldn’t really help if I panicked in the air, but gave me enough mental support so I wouldn’t panic.

Towards the end of this sequence of “almost backflips”, I started to get mentally tired: I wasn’t fully committing. In fact, even from the beginning, I wasn’t completely committing (you’ll noticed that all these backflips are pretty low to the ground).

Thus, we moved over to the tumble track, which is a not-so-bouncy trampoline, to practice my form (particularly, jumping/setting high).

After the first dozen, Elijah pulled his hand away and I was completely on my own.

Finally, after a number of attempts on the tumble track, I returned to the floor and continued flipping. Again, I wasn’t fully committing, but at least I was focusing on jumping higher.

I conquered a lot of fear today, and am almost certain that I will land an unassisted backflip on the floor during my next session.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

--

--