Sunday, June 14, 2015

Quest for the Perfect Frontflip

     I've been doing front flips randomly for the last 8 years and I still suck at them. Part of my suckiness can be the lack of motivation to train the movement in a consistent manner. Over the past year or two I actually have been consistently working with this movement only to become incredibly frustrated and confused. I have had varying levels of success with different techniques but what I want to do here is give my criterion for a "perfect" frontflip. Now there are many different ways that a frontflip can be implemented but I want to limit the environment to either a hard, non bouncy surface or grass because if the movement can be performed there, then it can work anywhere. There's a certain level of mastery required for any flip to be completed on the ground like this. The criteria:

  • The flip requires very little run up, 2 to 3 steps
  • It is quiet both on takeoff and landing
  • Zero pain
  • Landing is in an upright position with a quarter squat to maybe even a half squat being the most that the person has to absorb, anything further than that is a fail, the quarter or 1/8 squat is the ideal landing. Landing like a pencil is likely to make too much noise
    Doing fronts over things, onto things, from a low squat position, or from standing are all important variations but the one we want here will come before these other developments.

     Now as far as the tutorials are concerned, every one that I have seen where someone does really well, (jenx, marvin ross, etc.) the person is super skinny/ has a high strength to weight ratio. In real life, I've seen the same thing. People are either really skinny and tall, or short and stocky, but still quite lean. Of course strength to weight ratio matters but I think that there are more factors that influence strength to weight ratio, such as the tensile strength of muscle tissue in general. The higher weight you have, the less proportional strength you're going to be able to produce regardless of how lean you are, so i think being on the lower end matters quite a lot. The people that seem to do the best, given the standards I've thrown out there weigh between 125-150 lbs which is pretty low for a male today.
     Anyways I think we've known this for quite awhile due to the selection of gymnasts but there is an "I can do anything" mentality in parkour that makes some standards look pretty unrealistic. I'm not saying its impossible to do a frontflip like i've described at higher weights, just saying that from what i've observed, heavier dudes have to usually take a lot of impact either on the landing, the takeoff, or both to produce the force necessary to propel them into the air super high. At any rate, more data is required. For myself, my landing is too hard if I have a gentle takeoff (like this) or my takeoff is a hard punch for a soft landing(like this). Other variations include the russian front and the half russian front, (kind of like a double elbow strike).
    This post is meant to be a kind of addendum/inquiry after the standard tutorial for front flips where people just say important things like keep the chest up, arch, hollow, hips over head, etc. Also it will be a bridge to the detailed master post where I've finally achieved the perfect front flip after experimenting and training like crazy. I'm asking the internet for a few things, namely,  1) the best tutorials they've seen for fronts that helped them to achieve the perfect front flip, 2)outlier examples of people over 160lbs doing good quality fronts on non bouncy surfaces, 3) their own approach to training these things. Remember, it's pointless to post a video with music that covers up the sound of someone's landing/takeoff for an in depth study.

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