Like many people, Naryan Shukle fell on an icy walkway today.
But unlike many, he managed to avoid a serious injury. Even after we asked him to fall on the ice over and over again.
The Kanata teen is a judoka – he practises judo with the Ottawa Judo Club. The sport is known for its high-flying shoulder throws and leg sweeps. But that means the very first thing a judoka learns is how to fall properly. And it’s a lesson that comes in equally handy on an icy sidewalk.
“The most important thing when you fall is to protect your head,” says Brian Kalsen, President of Judo Ontario. “Usually when people fall their head goes flying backwards and that’s when the most damage can be done. And in judo the first thing you learn is to tuck your chin in and control yourself.”
The other general objective to judo’s falling techniques, or ukemi, is to spread the impact of the fall over as much of the body as possible. When falling directly backwards, Shukle slaps his arms flat on the ground at a 45 degree angle, absorbing the fall with his arms and back while keeping his head tucked in. “Without training, people will always stick their hand out and jam their elbow and their wrist. So you never want to do that,” he says.
And that’s the key, overcoming one’s natural instinct in that split second of panic while you fall and instead relax and let your training kick in. That, says Kalsen, only comes after months of practise.
But the rewards can last for years. Kalsen says he often hears from former judoka who have protected themselves during a fall. “Every month I’ll see people at the mall, and they haven’t done judo in ten years, and they’ll tell me a story about how they had their baby in their arms and they fell and they didn’t panic and they knew how to sort of protect themselves and their baby.”
