Head down! I started head down at about 5 hours in the tunnel. This is a progression through the next 2 hours of tunnel time, some of which was spent on calming down my sit fly.
Head down turns out to be easier than back or sit fly so far. I lifted off the net on the first time out! As you can see, we worked on body positioning. There are three main body positions: daffy left, daffy right and shelf (both legs back). I chose to do daffy one side and wait to learn the other two at Mikey's direction. Learning body position balance requires learning burbles (you can see Mikey burbling me with his body in one of the clips) and getting exercised in push pulls.
The primary foundational principle for head down is sit fly, which is your bail. When learning sit fly, back fly is the bail; so you can see how these fundimentals (belly back sit head-down) progress as one supports the next. I am STILL working on the proper bail for head down, which will allow me to go hands free from spotters in the coming hour of tunnel time.
Watching this progression reminds me how much learning to fly is somatic. You can be as intellectual as you want about what you need to be doing, but ultimately, the body learns super fast if you just let it figure out the wind by following coaching directions. STOP THINKING. Do what Mikey says and don't question it. IT WORKS!
The other fun thing about head down is the wind speed. This is really where the air gets cranked up. I'm flying 85% which makes my bails super hard, so I am learning to fly sit at 85% while also learning head down, which is why some of my bails get scary! You can see Mike talking to the wind driver and telling him what wind speeds to shift to during the course of each head down attempt.
Flips are also crucial to bails (which you will see here) as well as are required to learn to eventually transition from sit to head down and vice versa.
5 ноя 2016
