How to fall

📌 TL;DR / Quick Summary <div style="background: rgba(0,0,0,0.3); border: 1px dashed rgba(255,255,255,0.2); padding: 15px; border-radius: 8px; color: rgba(255,255,255,0.7); margin-bottom: 30px;"> Notes from the falling clinic at 🏋️ Chalkline Climbing, as Dario Conti teaches it. I sat through it on 22 October 2022 with my right foot in a brace, two weeks after 🩹 2022-10-08 - Right ankle sprain, taking notes from the edge of the mat like a journalist. I did the drills myself six weeks later. Falling is a skill and I had been treating it as an event. </div>

🛠️ Instructions / Core Material

1. Decide before you leave the ground. Look at the landing. Is the mat there, is it flat, is anybody standing on it, is there a gap between two mats. If the answer to any of that is bad, fix it or pick another problem.
2. Climb down when you can. Most of my falls were from the top, after the hard part, because I had not planned how to leave. Downclimb on the big holds of any colour.
3. If you are coming off, come off. Push away a little so that you are clear of the holds below, and look where you are going.
4. Land on both feet, about hip width, knees soft. Not stiff, not on one leg, not on tiptoe. One leg is how the ankle happened.
5. Keep going down. Let the knees fold, sit, and roll onto your back. The mat is for rolling on. Dario's word for it is melt.
6. Arms in. Hands across the chest or out in front. Never reach behind to catch yourself: a wrist is not a landing gear.
7. Chin to chest so the head does not whip back when the roll finishes.
8. Get off the mat. Somebody else is above it.

The drills, in the order he runs them

• Standing on the mat: sit, roll, arms in. Ten times, until it is dull.
• From the first hold, feet at knee height. Then waist height. Then stop, because that is enough for one evening.
• From a slab, where you slide instead of drop: push off, turn slightly, same landing.
• Last: falling when you did not choose to, with a partner calling off at random.

⚠️ Key Warnings / Constraints

• Notes for me from one clinic, not instruction for anybody else. Dario runs it on the first Sunday of the month and it is the best ten euros in the building.
• On an overhang you swing out and land on your back. Different fall: the feet are not coming first and you should not try to make them.
• Spotting indoors mostly means keeping people off the mat. Caleb Ostrow explains all of this with physics. The physics is correct and does not help in the air.
• I re-read this on 16 March 2025, the day after the finger, to check whether I had fallen badly. I had not fallen at all. Different lesson.

🔗 Related Entities & Resources

• 🏋️ Chalkline Climbing: where the clinic runs.
• 🩹 2022-10-08 - Right ankle sprain: why I was sitting on the edge of the mat in a brace.
• Caleb Ostrow: the physics, on request.