Backflip abdominal pain

[Sean Whitley]

I've been trying to get the standing back tuck for three years now and every time I finally get a spotter and the confidence to do it on the ground I have abdominal pain for up to a week afterwards,  possibly like a sprained muscle. I can easily do for example 50 back tucks in a session on a trampoline with reasonably good form (rotating from the hips and landing where I started, not throwing my head back etc) but as soon as it comes to the ground all it takes is 2 or 3 to really hurt the day after. I know my form on the ground isn't as good but its near impossible for me to improve the skill due to the pain after such few attempts.

 

Has anyone here experienced this and have any advice? I'm sitting here now three days after my last attempt and its still painful to laugh or even walk. I am getting really frustrated not being able to achieve this simple skill after three years and it affecting my other training for days afterwards every time I try.... 

[Daniel Burnham]

Couldn't say without a video, but most likely you are throwing your chest back and then whipping the rest of your body around after instead of setting up and tucking over.

 

Pretty common thing when guys are new to the skill.  The key to getting rid of this is doing all the progressions before moving into the tuck that work on set.

[Coach Sommer]

This is indicative of weak abdominals.

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Daniel Burnham]

This is indicative of weak abdominals.

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

And this   .  Preparing your body for a skill never hurts. (unless you don't know how to prepare yourself.)

[Michaël Van den Berg]

Hah! I remember when I was young and wild (31 or so ) and I still played capoeira. I'd never tried a backflip but one day we rented a gymnastics facility to play around and I did a bunch of them in a row, with no technique whatsoever of course, and I had the same severe DOMS for at least a week afterwards.

 

I realize I'm not being helpful but thank you for a short trip down memory lane!

[Timothy Aiken]

With new tumbling and movement patterns severe DOMS is normal. Since you never gave your body time to adapt (only doing them once in a while), you get the same DOMS every time. 

 

My first back tucks made me sore for at least a week afterward. On the floor you need so much more explosive recruitment than on the trampoline. So yeah, what Coach said. 

[emos]

My first backtuck attempts left me sore for over a week, probably the most severe DOMS I've experienced, haha.

 

Try some light ab exercises to speed their recovery and just build up slowly even if it means doing just one or two backtucks in a session at first. Arguably many more than that is a bad idea at first, anyway - I ruined (seemingly forever...) my backtuck ability by doing too many in each session and becoming tired, using bad form and basically unlearning the skill. That was over a year ago and I can't find a way to retrieve them

[Col Wild]

A late reply but might help...

I had the same "sprained muscle" feeling when doing them.

I found that doing the bridge stretch helped prepare my abs for the sudden and extreme stretch that they undergo during a backflip ( for me, backflip is; from feet, to hands, to feet).

Hope that helps

[John Senko]

A standing back tuck on the ground is almost ALL about the abdominal muscles. Sure, you use your legs, back and arms to get up off the ground with a bit of angular momentum. But then it is all about pulling it around with the abs.

 

A standing back tuck may be the single most abusive thing that you can do to those muscles. Consider: Your abs are not built or conditioned for a major power stroke. They are there to be used mostly for holding position continuously. So a full stroke contraction from fully stretched into a tuck is not something that you do often, and those muscles are not really designed/evolved for that.

 

But it is not just the full contraction the hurts. You can strain yourself against an arbitrary load with those muscles without moving them, and that doesn't cause as much pain. It is the rapid contraction under very heavy load that makes those muscles unhappy. Rapid contraction without as much load doesn't hurt as much either.

 

You cannot be quite so violent on them doing simple situps or crunches, because during a back tuck, the full contraction happens very rapidly, and you are fighting centrifugal force. The fact that your spine was unwinding in the opposite direction at the moment that you start pulling into the tuck makes it worse. And of course, when a beginner is fully focused on the fear of landing on one's head, and running on a little bit of adrenaline, it is easy not to notice how much those muscles didn't really like what they were doing at the moment either. 

 

Back in the 70's and 80's, it seemed like their was a nearly universal hazing/rite of passage among gymnasts that I met. A young gymnast gets excited and tells you that they just learned to do the standing back. They show you. You say to them: "Very nice! But you do not want to start to forget what you learned, or loose your nerve tomorrow. So I recommend that you practice that maybe 20-50 times more tonight. "  This was deliberately planned torture, as the poor gymnast would spend days afterwards walking hunched over because the abs hurt so much. (Even teenagers that had been doing a lot of conditioning on their abs!) Possibly this added a bit more strength in a hurry, but we all did it for reasons similar to fraternity hazing I suppose. They did it to me, and I passed on the tradition. I wonder if this tradition is still alive. 

 

I am in my mid 50s and recently became determined to reverse the neglect that finally caught up with me less than 10 years ago. I should lose 20 lbs. About eight years ago, I could still pin a standing back tuck with complete confidence. Now, I am a bit low and under-rotated because of strength:weight ratio issues, and my hands always come down after my feet hit. A decade ago, I could still do three or four free-standing handstand pushups. Now, I cannot even press a handstand. This must change.

 

I mention that because one thing that I have learned, is that unlike fifteen years ago, I cannot do a single standing back tuck without proper warmup, or my abs will pay severely for it the next day. 20-30 rapid situps seems to be enough. Perhaps if I worked on this more often, that wouldn't be the case. 

 

I was talking to a neighbor last year, lamenting the way that middle age had caught up with me, and that I had neglected myself. For thirty years after High School, I kept almost all my strength and much of my flexibility without ever deliberately working on it. That changed. So I said to her: "You know, I have been telling people since I was 18 that I expect to be doing standing back tucks when I am 70 years old, and nobody ever believes me."  She replied "Oh, I believe you." To which I responded, "That's only because you know me and you think I am insane." To which she said, "Well, Yea."

 

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Note for beginners: It is a whole lot easier to learn a standing back with maybe a 1.5 - 2 lb wrist weight on each wrist. You will be amazed how much higher you go!

 

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For the last five years, I have been having recurring dreams where I start doing consecutive FRONT handsprings, sometimes just for fun and exercise, sometimes because in the dream world it is faster than running. I have NEVER done consecutive fronts handsprings in this reality. At first, there were times when I was waking up and when it took me several minutes to accept the idea that in this particular reality, I cannot do that. This debate has happened so much when I was halfway between awake and asleep that it has moved into my dreamworld.  "How did I ever let myself start to believe that I cannot do this!?" Honestly. I often spend two minutes waking up quite convinced that I do consecutive fronts all the time. It is nearly as much of a let down as waking up from the flying dreams.