Originally Posted by canklecat

Nice theory. Rarely works without regular practice.

In the real world only trained athletes who practice regularly actually have a shot at falling in a way that minimizes injury. They train and repeat exercises until it's instinctive. That's mostly football players and martial artists because their sports involve lots of falling. Maybe gymnasts. It doesn't include boxers, my background in martial arts. Because boxers don't train to fall. What little training I had in judo and karate was so long ago and never reinforced with practice that I doubt there's an residual instinct to fall as trained. We were trained to use an outstretched arm along with rolling to break a fall. That's what I happen to do instinctively, but I doubt it's due to training. Just a natural reflex.

That instinct from training doesn't include the vast majority of cyclists. Look at all the many hundreds of videos with road cyclists falling. Most of them fall without any apparent plan because it happens too quickly. There's no time to think your way into a correct fall. There's no practical way to train to fall on the road that isn't also incredibly risky.

Mountain bikers have a better shot at falling correctly, especially downhill stunt cyclists. Ditto BMXers and freestyle cyclists. They suffer a lot of injuries over a career, including concussions that can lead to psychological problems.

As I've said before, when we fall and aren't injured we congratulate ourselves on our superhuman reflexes and finely honed instincts. When we're injured we chalk it up to bad luck. Then when we retell stories of our misadventures we selectively choose those that confirm our biases.

Originally Posted by jefnvk

My point is not that is not instinctual to catch yourself, it is that I doubt there is any sports trainer who would argue that catching yourself with an outstretched hand is a better idea than relaxing and letting your side absorb the impact. And we're talking about an event that you can literally go "oh crap I'm falling I'm falling", not something that happenes so fast you stand up twenty feet from the accident site going "WTF???". I'm not going to argue that there aren't situations one can't do the proper thing in, but in this threads case I'd never advocate trying to catch yourself.