Bad Habit...

My good habit turned into bad habit.

When I feel myself falling, I anticipate before I touch the ground in positioning myself in a secure position. It's instinctive. I've acquired this habit along my dozen years of inline freestyling without pads. I'm thus used to land with optimal positions to preserve my knees, buttocks and wrists.

Good habit, right.

My Top-3 landing techniques:

• American Splits: (my fav. by far) it's the best one to disguise your fall into a super-stylish cartwheel at low height ending up with smooth American splits... and up!
• Push-ups: using my arms like springs to smoothly get lower as possible and get up.
• Save-Yr-Ass Technique: That's the very one about which this whole article is about...

Now, parameters have changed. To play derby I *have* to wear pads.

My techniques have now become useless -- or at least there's still this aesthetic advantage, and people still wonder sometimes whether I did a trick on purpose or I fell for real but disguised it. A couple of years ago, I learnt that in China people called me the White Cat because a falling cat always lands on its feet... flattering -- If ever they knew the TRUTH !!

NOW. Not only has this habit become useless (in a practical way: I got pads to do the job) but it has even become dangerous... Another parameter has changed too: I'm not wearing inline but quad skates!

There is one landing position in particular which troubles me now: my Safe-buttocks technique,  consisting in bending my leg just under my buttocks in order to create some kind of spring effect to cushion the landing. Just like on the pictures.

A 100% success with inline skates.

NOT working with quad skates...

...because you save your back but you sacrifice the "front", as the wheels and the trucks jute out from the boots, if you see what I mean.

And it hurts...