It's been quite a while since we've had a bad fall in acroyoga...
But last training session we had one of our worst fails since training together.
It's always a big learning opportunity when something goes wrong or you have a fall or injury in acroyoga, and we think it's important to make sure we understand how and why it happened.
Plus to share that with others so hopefully people can learn from our mistakes and not need to repeat them!
So let's start with what happened:
We were having a good productive training session where we were focused on skills that we've either recently taken spotters away from, or were aiming to take the spotters away from some skills we have been training.
We moved to practicing front tucks (which we have taken out of spotters about 4 months ago, and has felt fairly safe to us), but we haven't consistently trained it, so we have since used spotters sometimes when changing things, and sometimes not.
We started by practicing with a spotter.
First doing hands on spotting, then step in.
After one set of about 10 reps, we then moved to doing them without the spotter.
We threw about 3 without the spotter and all was going okay.
Then we threw the 4th attempt and BAM!
All of a sudden my foot slipped off Laura's butt in the catch and her seat bone landed right on my face, just below the eye, and partly on the nose.
It also wasn't a soft landing as I hadn't caught enough of her to slow or reduce the fall, so it was pretty much a full-force impact landing on my face.
Next, let's talk about the consequences...
Luckily my face is apparently pretty tough, because after the first few seconds of immediate pain and shock, I was able to recognize or realize I hadn't broken anything or done any significant damage.
My nose was a bit bloody and tender/bruised but for the rest I was totally fine (I was even confident enough to feel like I didn't have a concussion or anything like that).
Laura also got some impact from the fall, a heel to the side of the boob, but for the most part nothing serious (which I'm quite happy about and is one of the benefits of the flyer landing on the base is it tends to be softer than the floor, haha).
There were of course more consequences than just the physical though.
My nervous system was obviously a bit on edge afterwards, and after trying a few more acroyoga things, we decided it would be best to stop the training session and let my nervous system calm back down properly.
And there was the consequences of doubt, concern, slight upset and a desire to understand where we went wrong etc.
Next we can discuss what went wrong technically (like acroyoga wise why we messed up).
Our front tucks have been tending to travel forwards instead of landing in the same position on top of me.
There's several reasons for that happening, but it's something we have been aware of, and in the process of taking the spotters away it's a concern we discussed and talked about how I can still catch if it travels a bit forwards, but if it travels too far forwards it would be difficult for me to properly catch.
In this particular attempt it did travel forwards (but not more than some other attempts which we still safely caught/exited from).
The other technical issue we've been having in the front tucks is a tendency for Laura to twist slightly to her left in the tuck.
Meaning she lands facing slightly to her left. This also varies in how much it happens, and it's something we've been working to correct (actually in this session it hadn't been happening as much).
In this particular attempt it happened quite a bit though, and I didn't anticipate or react to this well enough, which is why my left foot wasn't fully under her butt and slipped off the side.
Lastly is not something we've had much of an issue with so far in front tucks, but did happen in this particular attempt, is under rotation.
They tend to come around pretty well, but this time we were definitely under rotated, and it meant that I wasn't able to catch the feet.
There's more technical details when we re-watch our tucks in slow motion, but these are the main ones that stand out.
So we know the technical problems, and we somewhat were already aware of these, so what were the big learnings or takeaways then?
There were actually quite a few.
Firstly was the old gut feeling.
After the round of front tucks with the spotter I actually wasn't feeling 100% confident, I had a small doubt in my mind of if it would be totally safe.
The doubt was actually less about me, I didn't honestly anticipate getting a big hit in this skill myself I was more having a little doubt if it would be totally safe for Laura.
My main worry in this skill is if it goes really forwards and I can't properly catch it, it could be a hard impact for her into the floor with her feet or worse. Turns out it was a hard impact for me haha.
But the big learning which is something we've talked about before and know (but clearly I don't know well enough yet) is to voice our concerns or doubts and listen to the gut feeling.
This on its own may have been enough to avoid this from happening.
The second learning is that even though we have done a skill before out of spots, is to recognize when there is a lack of consistency.
Our front tucks in general are pretty inconsistent in how far forwards or not they travel, how much they twist or not and so on.
Whilst we know this and were working to fix these things, it would be much better to do that with spotters whilst it is still inconsistent.
The other option for this that we identified is that it would be better to go back to progressions or similar skills where we can work on fixing things like the twisting, and the travelling forwards (we could do this in cascades, or just front tucks on a trampoline).
Because in a challenging skill it is hard to fix these things whilst thinking of many things, so that's why progressions are great and they work to help fix one aspect of embodiment in an easier way.
Another takeaway for us is that we have been very focussed recently on taking some skills out of spots (at our check in for this session we even set that as our main intention).
So the learning is that whilst that is a good goal and can be beneficial to focus on, that we shouldn't lose sight of the safety, and how we are feeling that day.
In retrospect that training session was probably not the one to be taking the spotter away in that skill, and although we had the intention we should listen to the gut and the feeling and be open to shift inention if it's not right.
Lastly is about confidence/overconfidence. We have felt pretty safe in front tucks before, which is why we have progressed to doing them out of spots.
However that is not a guarantee, and this is just a note about always being mindful to measure your confidence level to your experience (and especially that your confidence shouldn't strongly outweigh your experience).
Let's finish on a few things of what we did well.
One thing we advocate to students is to get up and do the trick again (if you're not seriously injured, and able to).
And we did that in this case.
After a few minutes to calm down and sort ourselves out, we grabbed the spotter back and threw 3 more front tucks with the spotter.
They weren't great, and they weren't focussed on fixing the technique or anything.
The point is to just do them to help with the trauma, so the body, brain and nervous system doesn't have the memory of just the fail.
This way when we next come to train this skill it should be less scary or daunting.
What we also did well was support each other, and not blame or argue with each other.
This allows us to feel safe to discuss what went wrong and work together to figure out the learning and how we can do it better in future.
Lastly what we did well was video our training (and therefore captured this fail!), and also make it into a reel on instagram, so you can also see what we are talking about.
You can check it out here:
So there you have it, this was probably our second biggest acro fall/fail and something we will definitely learn from, and hope you can too.
Catch you next week with more acro insights! :)
Cas
