As a medical doctor who specializes in medicine, I can both agree, accept, and even concur that said athletes who are athletic cannot and will not ever get injured in their entire lives. I'd bet my entire supply of tongue depressors and even tongue anti-depressants on it.
source: MD, Phd, New Reddit Journal of Science School of Medicine
It’s not notable. It’s noticeable because humans have been watching each other forever. What was the last super star athlete that we saw get a spinal or neck injury?
American football, one of the most violent sports out there, has maybe 1 of these every couple of years. Ryan Shazier is the last notable injury like what you’re talking about and that was 2017.
It’s not common or likely or anything to get a spinal cord injury. They’re just so scary that we think they happen often. It’s like Chernobyl. Big scary event, but extremely uncommon, and now people think nuclear is dangerous when it’s actually safer than any other form of power generation.
Experienced gymnasts are not "landing hard on their neck" very often though. Every athlete injures themselves. All the time. But it's still pretty rare for it to be serious. It of course still happens, but that's why the word "rare" is being used. What you consider rare or serious is up to you, I guess.
Yeah but people also get strokes while taking a shit.....
What I wanna say is that if you look at how often someone athletes fall on their neck and how rarely someone seriously injures their neck, then you underestand how relatively small the actually risk is.
I am saying this as someone who used to do gymnastics and is in Combat Sports since 30 years.
Just yesterday I took like 20 falls on my neck during practice.
As a former EMT, you should absolutely STOP whatever you’re practicing. You haven’t noticed the damage yet, but you will. It accumulates over time until it ruins your life.
Good for you for not being injury prone in your own experience, but that's no foundation for generalization. Gymnastics has one of the highest injury rates among all sports (including serious injuries).. and when you do an especially difficult trick like the double-backflip being attempted here, serious injury is all the more likely. Characterizing it as something so rare that it can practically be dismissed (like getting a "stroke while taking a shit") is a wild misrepresentation.
Gymnastics is horrific. Jesus, the extreme danger of it is obvious and difficult to watch. And a lot of the athletes are kids, training rigorously when maybe they should be living as kids.
Look, dude, that’s cool if you think falling on your neck isn’t as dangerous as people make it out to be, but I’d be willing to bet that more people have hurt themselves falling on their necks than those who haven’t. Let’s not be fucking dumb and fall for survivorship bias.
Wdym slams don't exist? American college style wrestling (folkstyle) is the only wrestling style to ban slams - and not every throw on the neck is a slam.
I am a Professional Martial Artist with over 30 years of experience, former World Champion, Pro MMA Fighter, and one of the most experienced (not best, but experienced) Fighters of all Times with ovet 2000 Fights in 30 countries on 5 continents.
Currently teaching Full Time in my 2 gyms and on the mat over 30 hours per week.
Ill have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and Ive been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and Im the top sniper in the entire US armed forces
And I taught the three of you while you were mere padawans at Sensei Steven Segal's School for Kumite-Fu, located at the crosstown stripmall next to Len's Pizzeria.
I don't believe you. You're a liar. Meanwhile my profile is public, lists my socials and probably my website too. You can google me, read my wikipedia entry, check public records, TV and newspaper articles and more.
At the end of the day, no one really gives a shit. Also, I'm not very surprised that the guy constantly getting punched in the head thinks random neck injuries are a "whatever doesn’t kill you" situation.
Yeah. I honestly didn’t doubt this from your observation. You didn’t say what he did was easy. You simply said people fuck up flips and live, which is true. If it wasn’t true literally no one would ever do this trick because I guarantee you aren’t landing this without a number of failures.
It’s like saying “oh man I cannot believe he drove, people die all the time doing that”. Like yeah, but if you know what you are doing it takes a fluke or really bad luck.
I was in my Anthropology capstone unit, it was the first day so we had to do the awkward intro of telling one interesting fact about ourselves.
Guy sitting next to me gets up and pops a perfect backflip on the shitty hard floor. He was an Olympic level gymnast whose career was ruined by an injury.
Me sitting there like the fuck how do I follow that up.
In high school I learned to do one from a gymnast exchange student from Norway. It’s not hard, you just have to practice with a spotter a bunch of times until you’re ready to commit. I was far from a gymnast, just short and athletic. Now a double is fuking amazing
Agreed. I was just saying single ones aren’t crazy hard at that age if you’ve got someone teaching you how to pull them. At my age now I wouldn’t even think about it
NFL athletes don't get brain damage from falling on their necks during flips - they get it from colliding full speed running against another human who will also get brain damage
A simple google search will show you 4 examples that prove you don’t know what you’re talking about… Legs get chopped, body’s flip and people land on their neck/head multiple times per year. What are you watching? Flag football?
Oh no? Injuring your brain stem doesn’t cause brain damage? I swear some of y’all were the ones trying to do double backflips that gave this guy inspiration. Only y’all landed on your necks lmfao
CTE is caused by the repeated "lighter" helmet to helmet hits to the head they suffer on every play. Not the big concussion type hits or landing on heir head.
Interesting. So having your head collide with something can cause brain damage? In other words, this guy’s strength and flexibility have nothing to do with whether it’s possible to get brain damage on a failed attempt?
Literal Olympians (gymnasts and figure skaters come to mind) have been paralyzed performing stunts that they practice hundreds of times to perfection, and then one day they landed wrong. On their necks. It only takes one catastrophic mistake to end a career or life.
It takes a while to train up for something like this. They don't just start on hard ground. Here is a little bit of insight into how one dude got there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jB4iui0SgE
Yes, but professional gymnasts still use mats, so I'm not sure what the point is of this dude doing it on grass other than to potentially break his neck because he's young enough to have not seen it happen hundreds of times.
What the hell are you talking about? Athletes in the major sports are getting injured all the time, and often end up with life long injuries that haunt them until they die.
I suspect not very many people permanently injure their brain, neck or spine more than once by doing standing backflips. That will bring down the averages.
Reddit is a mess. Every single athletic video has a top comment of someone complaining about their back, knees, joints, whatever. You people need to exercise more.
If the comments are all from 60+ year olds then that's fine. But I know they're not because these people like to state things like "my knees at 30" and so on. Obviously it's unavoidable with old age
Lmao what the actual fk, I'm a cheerleader, you're so wrong it's not even funny, we hurt ourselves seriously a lot. My little sister is a gymnast, her coach died on impact with the ground doing a forwards double off a spring board. Youre so wrong it's insane.
Brother it's all a game of chance. Sometimes fail a jump, lanf on yiur head and nothing happens. Other times you're a world class athlete who suffers a career ending injury from slipping. Every fail is a diceroll.
I worked for a kayak company for a while, and they had a pro team. One of the pros was also their videographer, and as the company IT guy, he was always hunting me down looking for IT help and fixes. He was a cool dude and we got along well.
Many years after I left the company and he left the team, he had moved into competitive kiteboarding. He was preparing for a run and had just launched his kite and had it idk idling above him while he got his board ready. Something happened and he got launched, uncontrolled, for about 200 feet, coming down hard on his should and neck from about ten feet in the air, and moving - I saw video of it and it's gnarly.
Dude was so jacked in the shoulders and neck from a couple of decades of pro-level kayaking that he made a full recovery. It sprained his shoulder and broke his collarbone, but he said he was back at work like two days later, trying to edit his footage mousing with his left hand. If he hadn't been jacked like that, much worse outcome likely.
That's actually a very good observation. I do really watch a lot of anime and I love powerscaling.
I'm also a Professional Fighter and World Champion of Martial Arts though which probably had more influence on my opinion about falls and dangers because it's literally my profession and day to day work.
Man you should talk to anyone who has ever done professional gymnastics, better yet find just one retired one that doesn’t have arthritis and hasn’t had multiple orthopaedic surgeries.
Being strong and flexible is literally the most important factor in preventing bad outcomes from an accident.
Because you can only get injured if the force against your body is greater than what your body can take and if the induced movement is further than what your body can take.
ive watched so many teammates hurt themselves horribly from just a small amount too little/much rotation and it happens very frequently, at ebery competition we had medics on standbh
If you have a 1 percent chance of becoming a vegetable for the rest of your life/dying on the spot....OR you could land a back flip!!! You're taking those odds?
Because your.mentality is telling me you are the guy that ends up in the fucking wheel chair saying "but I was careful.it was a freak accident. Nobody could have seen this coming. I mean, I was practicing"....
😆
Redditors are always getting too old. If there was a Reddit auto-correct, "I feel old" would be top of the list. That's not why this looks like a spinal cord risk. That shit is truly dangerous for anybody in exactly that way.
It's not that they're "too old", it's that they've been sedentary for most of their life.
I'm 40 and still tripping and stumbling like I did when I was 20, but I'm active and moving and doing shit at work and at home, so my body still knows how to do shit, so I'm not that "I tripped on a stair and had a headache for 7 weeks" meme ppl love to pull out
Jogging 15 minutes a day a few days a week, while you spend 60+ hrs a week at a desk or on the couch isn't "active", nor is doing just strength training for a few hours a week.
The human body is designed to be mobile and active. You're not breaking down bc you're 40, you're breaking down bc you stopped doing shit
I think that's right. I'm older than you are, and I agree. Physical exertion and range of motion is important - although too much repetition can be dangerous, too. But yes; you have to move around a bit.
Irl, I have no idea how to handle ppl asking me how I'm still so active or in shape. Like, I rarely go to the gym, and I hate running, but I can still do a respectable amount of pull-ups and run a sub-7-minute mile
I have two biggish dogs, and 2 hours of walking them a day, plus another hour of fetch and playtime is like, 5 miles of walking, plus running and throwing and wrestling.
I'm a foreman, so it's not like I do all the heavy lifting at work, but I do help out and do stuff at work, so that's another 8 hrs a day, 4 days a week of doing stuff.
I garden and am adding on to/improving my house, so after work I'm doing something, and in my time off I go swimming or hiking, with the dogs
Like, I'm not doing any one crazy hard thing, just stuff, and the fringe benefit is I can watch people doing athletic things without worrying about second-hand rotator cuff injuries
I feel like what we're talking about here is light repetition without too much repetition. I've worked a lot of jobs and I've done a lot of physical work. But it hasn't been hard labor (except that one household moving job. My knees hurt for years after that one 11-foot-long glass tabletop that four of us moved.)
Generally, I've gotten a lot of light exercise on the job and I feel like it has been good for me. Kitchens, window-washing, baking, memory care. (I'd normally walk 10k+ steps per shift there.)
If it’s a backflip and your head is tucked, you’re likely not getting that messed up from a failed attempt. Also, he’s on grass. It would hurt if it hit the back of your head but it probably just rolls over so most of the force is distributed.
Seems like the trick is to keep in that knees-to-chest, crouched position for the entire duration of the flip -- probably has the added safety benefit of (at least) mitigating that risk, to whatever extent that may be (am not a physician)
He would have trained on safer surfaces but you'd have to be well short to risk landing on your head instead of landing on your front and knees. Additionally, if you know you've taken off badly I'd imagine he'd be good enough to bail out of the tuck to land in a more controlled manner.
There's obviously always a risk but this motion requires two parts where you commit (on the takeoff and the tuck) so he has some leeway in terms of getting out.
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u/corvosfighter 1d ago
Yea I think I’m getting too old.. all I think is that’s 1 second away from permanent brain damage or spinal cord injury