What we do with our bodies in the sky and tunnel is a blend of control and focus. To fly well, we need body awareness and flexibility working together. Flexibility offers many advantages in skydiving, but it’s also worth noting that it can come with a few challenges. In this article, we’ll explore how flexibility can both enhance and complicate your flying experience.
Mobility, yoga and deep stretching creates body awareness, which is crucial for flying
How does flexibility help?
Flexibility has a lot of obvious benefits. It improves your overall physical performance by allowing your body to move more freefly and efficiently during activities. Being flexible increases range of motion and helps prevent injuries. Flexible muscles are essential for maintaining good posture. They help balance and support everyday movements and athletic performance. In skydiving, this all translates to positive things. To be flexible in the sky brings the ability to fly open with symmetry, fly balanced and engaged. It gives you the ability to open areas that otherwise could be closed, such as the hips, the shoulders, the thoracic spine. Even a basic arch can be more challenging for those who aren’t flexible. Lifting the arms overhead can be a challenge for those whose shoulders are locked. Having a decent level of flexibility will unlock an ease and a range in your flying that will elevate your performance.
How can flexibility be a hindrance?
So then, if flexibility has so many benefits, how can it work against one in flying? Having too much flexibility in the body can make it challenging to hold the body in a certain range. A lot of female bodies can suffer in this area as some areas of our bodies are much more open naturally. For instance, the hip bones in women are typically more open, due to the pelvis being wider for childbirth; while men tend to have tighter hips, due to the structure of their hips and pelvic bone. More lax in our ligaments means more range in our movements.
Translated in the sky, let’s say in head up outface (head up movement on the belly) men, or tighter hips, tend to be more balanced in their lower wing with the legs being somewhat straight down from the hips. The natural tilt and closed-off state of the hips helps to keep the legs in a nearly straight line naturally. Whereas women’s bodies, or much more open hips, will need to apply more effort to bringing the knees and ankles in closer to the midline, otherwise the hips and legs can easily splay open causing instability, potentially unnecessary drag and a lack of efficiency in the wing. If the hip adductors are weak, and the hips are open, this can make for a struggle in this style of flying.
Notice the arms displaying hyper flexibility – extra effort is needed to maintain neutral alignment
Another area I see hindered by flexibility is in the shoulder joints. Let’s put a skydiver belly to earth in a traditional belly body position. Arms will have the tendency, if flown without awareness and effort, to be pushed back / above the shoulders, opening the joints even more. In a head up position, again without effort, the shoulders could be open and pushed back / up towards their end range once again losing efficiency and making that part of the wing more unstable. When we open ourselves into the end range of our flexibility that’s often also where we lose strength and control. Commonly, our strength isn’t built in those end ranges. So, when the hips are opened wide or the shoulders are opened wide, it’s very challenging to find the strength to work backwards in that range because of the lack of strength there, vs the natural locked position when flexibility is limited. This is hard to recognize on the ground in daily activity. But in the sky, or in the tunnel, this becomes highlighted.
The last area I see where flexibility can make for unwanted extra effort is in the lower back. As women have higher amounts of collagen, more elasticity and a different muscle and bone structure, our backs also can be more flexible naturally. In some women flyers I’ve worked with, I notice that there can oftentimes be a backbend while flying that comes naturally but in some cases actually breaks their wing and causes a deficit in performance. For some moves, this might be beneficial. But without awareness or control, it can also pose challenges or drawbacks.
General body awareness
It is essential for anything that we use our body in a concentrated way to have some general understanding of how to isolate and control the body. For flexibility in skydiving, tunnel flying, dancing, yoga, gymnastics and a multitude of other sports and uses, body awareness is crucial. It helps to be able to comfortably be in the body and know how to engage certain muscles, understand your alignment, and fire off different muscles and parts of the body. In flying, it helps immensely to already build in that mind and body connection on the ground. Having body awareness on the ground more easily allows for the body and mind to connect under pressure in the sky.
Let’s say that you need to fix your posterior tilt of your pelvis because, as a back flyer in an angle jump, your legs are lazy and your ankles are digging into the wind, creating an inefficient wing. With an interior rotation of your pelvis, your posterior chain will naturally become slightly more engaged, creating a more streamlined lower part of your wing. However, if you’re not accustomed to isolating that area, or any area, and creating movement, this can be tricky to do in the sky whilst under pressure to perform and hold your slot.
By focusing on body awareness and flexibility in skydiving through practice on the ground, you become more able to isolate and engage in the sky, when seconds go quickly and performance is necessary.
Coming Up – Flexibility 2: Practices tio Improve Mobility
In my next article, ‘Flexibility 2, I will outline a few practices to help you cultivate body awareness, flexibility in skydiving and share postures and mobility drills to help with flying.
Follow Alethia for more info on skydiving, mobility and overall fitness for flying.
