stick out your hand to break your fall or roll you shoulder and land on your shoulder? i’ve heard it both ways and want to here the ST community’s opinion
If you have time to think about it, you are not going fast enough.
ST answer
nice. how about your answer?
…sue the government for not maintaining the road, protecting you from negligent/aggressive drivers, or not requiring you to pass a test qualifying you to safely operate a bicycle. Take your pick as it fits the situation.
I usually try to do a Heisman pose on the way down.
That was his answer. Seriously, it happens so fast you have zero time to think/react. You are truly at the mercy of Mother Gravity. Luckily you’ll probably just skid off to the side of road unless you’re in a pace line in which case you can expect those behind you to quickly pile on top of the heap.
Tuck and roll - seriously. If you stick your arm out to break your fall, you might break your fall, but you’ll also break your collarbone.
stick out your hand to break your fall or roll you shoulder and land on your shoulder? i’ve heard it both ways and want to here the ST community’s opinion
Stick out your hand to break your fall??? It’s the other way around – the fall will break your hand.
Roll on your shoulder? You’re thinking of parachuting, not cycling.
I’ll second that you don’t really have enough time to think. I will also agree though that you would not want to land on your shoulder and risk a broken collar bone and who knows what else. If I had to choose, I would choose sticking my arm out.
From my own experience, it seems that I always stop my fall with my head.
In practice, I really don’t see that you would have the time to put out your hand to stop your fall, assuming you are going fairly fast. Better to use that arm to try to steer your way out of it.
If I was going very slow and basically just tipping over…I’d use my arm. I do this lots when mountain biking.
Tuck and roll - seriously. If you stick your arm out to break your fall, you might break your fall, but you’ll also break your collarbone.
100% correct. Tuck and roll to prevent broken collarbones, wrists, hands, etc. If you roll with the fall you will dissipate the force, keeping it from going to one spot.
If you have enough time poop your shorts and land on that…
Coming from experience if you put your hands out to break your fall you will break something, in my case it was both my elbows. Finally got clearance that they are both healed today and I can start PT. But like others have said it happens so fast you most likely will not have time to react, and if you crash as hard as I did you probably will not remember it. I went down hard and woke up in the Ambulance.
From Erik Saunder’s site (pro cyclist):
http://www.eriksaunders.com/legends.tuckup.htm
The “Tuck Up” Will Save Your Life, by Matt Decanio
**** i had a conversation in the Capital Ale House in RVA with Matt Decanio… “hey, you’re a pro… what do you do when you are about to crash?”… trick question? “i dont know…”…“whenever you are going to crash, just tuck up… ditch your bike and tuck into a ball and you are garanteed to survive… the object is to tuck your elbow to your hip, bring your head down to your fists and bring you knees up to protect your forearms”…(matt showed me this manoevre while he was half cocked wearing a blue pinstriped italian suit)… he stressed to me multiple times the importance of this simple trick and the miracles that it can work… “you will always make it” he promised… once i accepted that the tuck-up could save my life he explained that there was indeed more… when you are about to hit something, like a car, just throw you bike at it (he threw his air bike down the bar)… and THEN tuck (he once again demonstrated the tuck-up)… “you will survive every time”… “i did that when i was crashing into a gaurd rail once and i survived… i didnt even get hurt”… ok, makes sense… throw your bike at it whatever it is , car, gaurdrail, whatever- and then tuck-up… the tuck-up is indespensible in the repertoire of the pro cyclist… agreed, it can save your ass… “and then when you are about to fall off of a cliff,” he said… whoa… i know he is not going to try to tell me tuck up… and who the hell falls off of a cliff so often?.. maybe matt does… i dont remember what he said to do… he moved on to partially hydrogenated soy bean oil, which was a major talking point of his cousin jesse, but i will let him tell you about that…
I think Eric Saunder needs to spend more time thinking about riding a bike instead of thinking about ways to crash it.
Seriously, it happens to all of us. Some day you’ll join the club. No sense in fretting about it. Just accept it as inevitable. I learned a great deal when I left a half pound of flesh on the pavement. I ride different now but I still ride. I wouldn’t say I’m glad I went down but it was a good learning experience.
Depending on what angle your hand hits the ground you will likely break your wrist, your elbow or your collar bone. I had the good fortune to do both my wrist and elbow in one go a couple of years ago.
Bottom line is this, your natural reaction will be to extend your arm to break your fall. If you have enough time to begin this natural reactive motion and then think
“hmmmm this is not the best thing to do, I’d better pull my arm back in and do the tuck and toll thing instead”
you have more than enough time to not crash in the first place.
Sometimes of course you will go down so hard and fast you won;t even have time to begin the reactive process of extending your arm…these are the crashes that reeeeeealy hurt.
All those recommendations are probably right on the money…
but actually what i really do is… wrap my arms and thighs around my top tube and down tube to prevent my Cervelo paint job from getting chips/dents!
I don’t get all the crap answers to this one… this is a great question!
Matt D. pretty much nailed it, but add this to the answer; learn how to fall.
If you didn’t grow up constantly engaged in sports that teach you how to fall down without getting hurt (and many, many people wind up on bikes specifically because they sucked at/hated these sports,) you would be well served to learn how to fall.
Take a Judo class. Take a basic tumbling/gymnastics class. Go out in a grassy field and practice forward rolls for a few minutes some day.
I have taught many bicycles skills classes where one of the skills we discuss and practice is a basic forward roll. An incredible number of people have never done one, or haven’t done one since childhood. Yikes.
It’s entertaining to watch someone model the ballistic properties of a brick on a sunny day on a grassy field, but it is far less fun when this lack of skill results in broken body parts on a back road.
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now thats a new one on ST… take a judo class so if you fall you can roll correctly…
Anyways i fell coming back from class one day that was quite fun, my face broke my fall luckliy i was going up the hill no so fast and only broke my sunglasses in have chipped a tooth and had to get stitchs.
I wasn’t going 10 mph and had no time to react you’re gonna fall how you fall its just a matter of how your body feels like falling that day.
Grant
Tuck and roll - seriously. If you stick your arm out to break your fall, you might break your fall, but you’ll also break your collarbone.
Bingo!