Ludwig Hefele

Some thoughts on landing a jump
Soft landings / hard landings / forced landings
Jumping is one of the first pattern you will be confronted with when practicing parkour. Though the concept of jumping seems quite easy, especially the second part – the landing phase is not. There is more than just „land silently“ or „Try to not land on your heels“… In order to get deeper into the topic, we have to clarify the goals/intentions of a jump: most importantly (in my opinion) you want to absorb the kinetic energy / force - that occurs during the landing – as efficiently as possible. That means that your body has to create just the right amount of tension at the right time. At this point one problem occurs – most of the time practisioners anticipate the landing whether to early (hard landing) or to late (forced landing) – that means ones timing of muscle activation will not be perfectly timed with the first contact between feet and edge / ground. As a result not only your muscles will absorb the impact but also your passiv tissues like joints, tendons and ligaments (this is not necessariliy bad but it could lead to longterm injuries as well as to acute injuries for example „ankle things“). Lets think about hard landings for a moment – imagine someone`s playing kendama usually when you want to catch the ball you have to take the momentum out by softening the impact (the moment you try to anticipate the curve of the ball and imitatiing it with the wooden end of the kendama. As a result the ball will softly land on it instead of bouncing back up). You will intuitively try to take as much impact out as possible. Vice versa a hard landing that usually occurs when trying to stick a jump will never take out the impact as softly as a roll would do (soft landing). Its possible though to softening the process during a hard landing by not overtensioning your muscles while landing. That means you have to give off tension in order to absorb the shock more efficiently. Therefore you have to almost perfectly anticipate the moment of impact and react to it by producing just the right amount of force to minimize the impact.

Freedom of the hips, Positioning and building tension:
“Getting into an ass-to-grass squat without buttwinking is a genetic thing”... true but not necessarily true! (Genetics makes it easier for some whereas others have to put a loooooooot of work in it)
For the first time i was able to get into an ass-to-grass squat without rounding my back during the last third of the squatting motion (amazing feeling let me tell you) the deep squat therefore became a resting position which I could have hold for ever... even though 100kg were placed on my traps/shoulders.
My body learned that it didn’t need to over tense itself (what I mean here is i created tension just where and when it was needed: my body worked more efficiently... before I was used to overuse some areas for example my core/bracing and quadriceps).
What made the difference is that my hips could keep up an APT (anterior pelvic tilt) because they are far stronger and flexible, which is interesting since I didn’t train the deep squat itself in a long time. What I did though, was a lot of strength based flexibility work for example isometric splits and/or split squat variations.
As a result my hips allowed me to position myself in a far more sustainable, more efficient and stronger way. Everything worked better together - positioning, bracing, use of tension and muscle activation
The key, as always, was not to get better in the squat itself (I have been doing weightlifting for almost 10years now and got some decent results in my back/frontsquat without going fully ATG) but getting better in areas I haven’t been that good (splits and pancake)
And yeah I know that 100kg to big of a deal for most... but 100kg without breaking Form in the bottom position, keeping the APT certainly is.