Rolling, the most important and fundamental
move you will learn in your parkour and free
running journey.
So when first learning the break fall roll,
its good to find like a soft surface like
grass or something.
You don't want to learn it on cement because
if you are practicing and you mess up you
can hurt different parts of your back.
Or hit your head and then you're in for a
real doozy.
But grass is usually a perfect surface for
you to learn on.
So what you want to first focus on, is it's
not a forward summer salt like you do in gymnastics
because with the impact and momentum if your
going straight over your head there's always
the risk of you hitting your head.
So the idea of the roll is that you're going
from one shoulder diagonal across your back
to your hip so that you're not rolling directly
over your spine so that you can avoid any
potential injury.
Because you never know what kind of surface
you're going to be rolling on.
What you are going to do is your going to
find your you feel comfortable rolling over
and your going to focus on keeping your head
to the side and rolling over that side of
your back.
So it comes up like that.
Some people like to use their hands to support
themselves as they go into the roll.
That's personally what I do.
Some people like to do an arm scoop and kind
of allows them to make sure they tuck that
shoulder and so what ever your method you
just want to make sure you practice is slowly
so that you can get the feel for it and make
sure you practice it regularly with your training.
Cement is a good way to learn where you can
improve your roll.
So if you take it real slow as you do your
roll the same way you'll feel any bones or
protrusions in your back that will hurt or
kind of fell uncomfortable if you know your
not doing it correctly.
And everyone back is different so you may
need to adjust it a little bit to make sure
that you're doing the roll so that you're
avoiding those, those soft spots.
When you first start to learn the roll with
doing drops you want to start with something
low and work your way up.
Stairs are a perfect example, maybe if you
can find stairs over grass or something soft
you may not necessarily want to start with
cement.
But I'm just going to use these stairs as
an example on how you progress.
So when you land and hit the ground you don't
want to bend your knees a lot.
You don't want to come all the way down and
then roll but you want to be able to hit and
your knees just slightly bend and because
of the way you land you're able to fall into
the roll and your momentum will be dispersed
through the momentum of the roll as you see
here.
Sometimes accidents happen when you're doing
parkour.
And having the roll down, having it drilled,
your muscle memory will know just how to do
it.
And there is how you save yourself if you're
about to eat it.
You can actually use the roll to prevent yourself
from getting injuries that you would sustain
otherwise unless you knew how to roll correctly.
So you have your basic rolls but then you
also have dive rolling.
Which is where you actually leap over the
obstacle so you're going lot higher and ending
up into the roll where you're using your arms
and the way you tuck into it to disperse your
momentum.
So this can be more difficult because you're
not using your legs to help transfer the impact
into the roll but you're actually using your
arms and the roll directly as the impact to
disperse it.
So normally you don't do dive rolls off really
high things but you do it to get yourself
over things that might be hard to jump over
using your hands if its say barbwire or you
know various other different obstacles.
And then you can start using lower obstacles
to help in your technique and to see what
you're capable of.
So here's a low chain link fence that I'm
going to use to aid me in how I'm clearing
the obstacle.
