How to Fall Safely & Protect Yourself from Injury

Contents: Why Everyone Should Practice Falling / Three Falling Techniques / Rolling Out of a Moving Fall / How to Practice / More Agility Resources

Ten years ago I fell off a skateboard and broke my ankle in three places.

I’d been training for decades at that point. Gymnastics, judo, martial arts, plenty of parkour. I knew how to fall. And I still went down hard enough to need surgery.

The thing is, that fall could have been a lot worse. My body did what it had practiced thousands of times: I got my arms out of the way, I didn’t land on my head, and I didn’t stiffen up and try to catch myself with a straight arm. The ankle took the damage because the ankle was the thing that got caught. Everything else was fine. A year later I was back to 100%.

That’s what this article is about. You’re going to fall at some point. Everybody does. The only thing you get to decide is what your body does in the half second between losing your balance and hitting the ground. If you’ve practiced, your body handles it before you’ve had time to think. If you haven’t, you get whatever your reflexes come up with, and usually that’s a straight arm and a broken wrist.

I’m going to show you three falling techniques and how to build them up from the floor, plus how to roll out of a fall when you’ve got momentum behind you.

Why Everyone Should Practice Falling

Falls are the most common way people get seriously hurt without doing anything dangerous.

According to the CDC, more than 800,000 people are hospitalized every year for fall injuries, most often for a head injury or a hip fracture. More than 95% of hip fractures come from a fall, and usually a sideways one. Head injuries and hip fractures are strongly associated with mortality in older adults, which is why fall prevention gets so much attention in the medical world.

Most of that attention goes to preventing the fall: better lighting, fewer rugs, more leg strength. All good. But almost nobody teaches what to do once the fall is already happening. That’s the gap, and it’s a skill you can learn in a few weeks.

Two things to take from those numbers.

First, the injuries that do the real damage are specific: head, wrist, hip. Every technique below is built around keeping those three things off the ground. That’s the whole game.

Second, this applies to you now. Falling technique isn’t something you pick up at 65. By then you’re learning under pressure with less room for error. The people who protect themselves well later in life are the ones who built the reflex earlier, when they could practice on a mat with nothing at stake. I got hurt at 43 on a skateboard, and the only reason it was just an ankle is because I’d spent years falling on purpose.

So let’s build the reflex.

Three Falling Techniques to Practice

Watch the video first. I show every progression below, and it’s a lot easier to see where your arms and head go than to read about it.

For all three of these, start on something soft. A mat, a carpet, a lawn. You’re building the pattern first and adding surface later.

1. Falling Backward

This is the one most people run into: a slip on the stairs, a shove, a foot sliding out on ice. If you’ve done judo you’ll recognize it right away. It’s the first thing they teach.

The position:

• Chin tucked to your chest. This keeps your head off the ground. It’s the single most important cue in this article.
• Arms straight, palms flat. Your arms hit the ground first and take the impact so your back and head don’t.
• Back rounded. A rounded back rolls; a flat back slaps.

The progression:

1. Lying down. Start on your back. Practice the arm movement by itself: let your arms come up off the ground and slap back down, palms flat. Get comfortable with the feel of it.
2. Sitting. Sit with your legs out. Round your back, tuck your chin, and roll backward, letting your arms come out to the sides and hit the ground as your back makes contact. Bring your arms straight, palms flat.
3. Squatting. Squat as low as you can, then let yourself tip back and repeat the same pattern. This is the one to get really comfortable with, because in a real backward fall you want to drop into a squat as fast as possible before you go over.
4. Standing. Bend your legs quickly, squat down, tuck your chin, and let your arms break the fall. Start from a low stance and work up to full standing height over several sessions.

The mistakes to avoid: reaching back with a straight arm to catch yourself (that’s how wrists break), and letting your head whip back. If you can’t keep your chin tucked at one level of the progression, stay there until you can.

2. Falling Forward

Tripping on a sidewalk, catching a toe on a garden hose, someone bumping into you from behind. A forward fall is scary because your face is headed for the ground. The fix is landing on your forearms.

The position:

• Arms bent, hands up in front of your face, palms facing out. Open hands, never fists.
• Land on your forearms with your palms flat. Your forearms hit the ground together and spread the impact.
• Elbows do not touch the ground. Landing on the point of your elbow hurts like crazy and can do real damage.
• Keep your head up. Your forearms create a frame that keeps your face off the floor.

The progression:

1. Kneeling. Kneel with your posture straight, get your hands up, and fall forward onto your forearms. Push your hips back slightly as you go so you’re not diving. Do this a lot. It should feel boring before you move on.
2. Squat. Same pattern from a squat position. A little more height, a little more speed.
3. Standing. From standing, fall forward onto your forearms. I’ll be honest, this one is unnerving the first few times, and I’d suggest practicing it on something soft for a good while before you try a harder surface.

The wrist is the thing to watch here. Bending your wrist back to catch yourself with the heel of your hand is the instinct you’re training out. Forearms and flat palms, every time.

3. Falling Sideways

Real falls are rarely straight backward or straight forward. You slip on one foot, one leg shoots out, and you go down at an angle. Remember that most hip fractures come from sideways falls, so this one matters.

The good news is you already have the pieces. A sideways fall is a backward fall or a forward fall with a twist, depending on which way your body is turned.

Option one: treat it like a backward fall to one side. Turn your body slightly, extend your arm on the side you’re falling toward, and let that arm hit the ground and rebound up off the floor. Chin stays tucked. Practice this from sitting and squatting, just like the backward fall, and try it with one leg out in front like your foot slipped.

Option two: if your body is already rotated toward the ground, keep turning and land like a forward fall, on your forearms.

Practice both from different angles and heights. The point is to get your body used to going into a protective position no matter which direction it’s headed.

Rolling Out of a Moving Fall

The three techniques above cover a fall from standing. When you’ve got speed behind you, you need something different.

My skateboard fall was a moving fall. So is tripping while running, going over the handlebars, or getting knocked down in a sport. When you hit the ground with momentum, absorbing the impact in one spot isn’t enough. You need to send that momentum somewhere, and the answer is a roll.

The rolling cues that matter most:

• Go shoulder to opposite hip. The roll travels diagonally across your back, from one shoulder down to the opposite side hip. You do not roll straight over your spine.
• Keep your head out of it. Shift your head to the side and roll past your neck. On the backward roll, a trick that helps a lot in the beginning is to look at the toes of the leg going over you. It forces you to stay to one side.
• Don’t let your elbow hit the ground. On the forward roll, thread your arm between your knee and your hand, push off, and let yourself fall over the arm. Start low.
• Back roll first. Learn the backward roll from lying on the ground before you try the forward roll. Once the back roll is comfortable, the forward roll comes pretty easy.

Rolling is a bigger topic than I can cover here. If you want the full progression, from the ground up through standing rolls, go through the basic tumbling tutorial. Same principles, a lot more detail.

How to Practice Falling

Add it to your warm-up. That’s it.

Five minutes before your regular training, run through the backward fall from sitting and squatting, the forward fall from kneeling, and a couple of sideways falls. Whatever level of the progression you own, do that one until it’s automatic, then move up. If a level falls apart, go back one. Both are productive sessions.

Soft surface first. Carpet, a mat, grass. Once every level feels easy on something soft, you can start practicing on harder ground, and I mean start. A wood floor, then maybe a gym floor. I don’t want you out on the concrete testing your forward fall from standing on day one.

The body is really good at adapting when you train it. After a few weeks, you’ll start to notice that when you stumble, your chin tucks and your hands come up without you deciding anything. That’s the whole point. Practiced enough, the technique stops being something you know and becomes something you do.

More Resources for Building Agility

Knowing how to fall is one piece of moving well through unpredictable situations. Working on the rest makes falls less likely in the first place, and makes the ones that do happen easier to handle.

• Improve Your Body Control: the most important part of agility. Without good control over your movements, you can’t respond well when something unexpected happens.
• Why Most Balance Training Doesn’t Work: what actually keeps you upright, and why standing on one foot with your eyes closed isn’t it.
• Become Less Clumsy: if you’re the person who’s always bumping into things, these will help you fall less often to begin with.
• Get Comfortable with Transitional Movements: falls tend to happen in between positions. This is how you build control over the in-between.
• Learn How to Tumble: the full rolling progression, and a lot of fun.
• Incorporate Play into Your Routine: one of the best ways to build the kind of control that handles surprises.
• Manage and Avoid Injuries: what to do if and when you do get hurt.