Originally Posted by Carbonfiberboy

I've fallen and/or crashed quite a number of times on bikes in over 60 years of riding. Never broke anything. I never put my hands out. When a road cyclist falls, it's usually a low-side fall. The tires lose traction, a wheel is trapped by a road irregularity, or one simply falls over. When that happens, if you keep your arms in, most of the energy is absorbed by the hip, some by the chest/shoulder.

Somewhere, I think in Bicycling Magazine, I saw an article about teaching bicycle police riding techniques, including falling without getting injured. The instructor had them ride in a circle at a low speed on pavement, then suddenly turn the wheel out and fall. Hands stay on the bars, elbows tucked, take the fall on your whole side. They weren't wearing protective gear other than their helmets. They didn't hit their heads. They didn't break anything.

OTOH cops ride MTBs. It's a little different with road bikes where we ride on the hoods most of the time. I know of one high speed fall where the rider lost fingers from having them ground off when his hand was trapped on a hood. That's very unusual though. Usually in a high speed fall, the bike is ripped right off your feet and you're separated from it. See TdF crash videos.

Pros crash a lot. It's a dangerous job. If you look at their injuries, it's usually road rash on hip and leg. A few of my older riding buddies have suffered broken pelvises or femurs from road crashes. OTOH, they didn't do gym work and so were probably more fracture-prone. These things support my own experience which is that mostly we take the hit on our hips if we don't put an arm out and I think a hip is a lot harder to break than a collarbone, given the number of obviously distorted collarbones on my riding buddies.