How to do a Backflip
(And Pretty Much Everything Else in Life)
So you’ve decided you want to do a backflip. You’ve been able to do them on the trampoline since you were a kid, and you figure you’re in good enough shape to give it a go on solid ground. You’ve practiced your form with the gracious support of trampolines, mattresses, and crash pads. You’ve refined your core with tuck jumps and bolstered the springs in your calves with explosive plyometrics. You’ve studied instructional videos online, which taught you to set your flip, begin rotation at the apex of your jump, and hold your tuck tight for maximum rotation speed. On the trampoline, your legs feel like powerful pistons, canons of explosive kinetic energy. You launch off of the black polypropylene canvas and wait milliseconds before bringing your knees to your chest, squeezing your shins tight. Your coiled body cuts the wind like a buzzsaw, you lengthen, spot the canvas, and when you land on the trampoline, it gives beneath your feet. Adrenaline surges through your veins.
It’s time. You're ready.
You clumsily dismount the trampoline, damp grass tickles the soles of your bare feet, and you realize you’ve never felt heavier. It is as though right now, at this moment, at the precipice of your achievement, gravity has caught wind of your defiance, and it is none too pleased.
That’s fine, you say to yourself, you just have to get your land legs back. You pace the yard, springing off of your feet, one at a time, two at a time, and after every bounce, ropes from below snag your ankles and your heels crash back to the soil.
If you don’t do it now, you never will.
You set your feet shoulder-width apart. Your legs tremble and you drag your limp arms up in front of you, preparing for your set.
But your legs won’t move.
Your mind screams at them, wills them, curses them, but they are inept. You tell yourself to buck up, just throw it. You visualize the flip, you see yourself doing it, you know you can. Your rotation is fast and your standing jump is sufficient. But then again, what if you can’t? Images flash before you of failed attempts, of your neck crunching between the vice formed by the ground and your body. You can feel your spine tingle and your head throbbing. Now you don’t even want to try, but your legs won't move and all that energy and adrenaline you’ve cultivated is stuck inside you: a raging, burning star on the brink of supernova. It’s got nowhere to go, because your damned legs won't move. You’ve hit the wall.
The wall, as I call it, is the purest, most distilled manifestation of fear. At its core, the wall is a confrontation with the self. In reality, the backflip is a very simple acrobatic maneuver. I know to say such a thing feels arrogant or even delusional, but relative to many other gymnastics skills, with the exception of perhaps the cartwheel, it is the most achievable. If you maintain any baseline level of physical fitness, if you can jump and tuck your knees to your chest, you can do a backflip. The hardest element of the skill is not the technique or the strength required, it's breaking through the wall. I’ve coached several of my friends, all of varying sizes, on how to do a backflip, and I have seen the wall present itself before each one of them. In backyards during broad daylight, in wrestling rooms and gyms, and even atop a hill in the midst of a raging, psychedelic thunderstorm, I’ve watched some of the most gritty and disciplined young athletes I know paralyzed by their fear. All of my pupils, if I could be so pompous as to call them that, were plenty capable of performing the flip. Their barrier was not a physical one, but rather a mental one. That’s what makes the wall so frustrating: You by all means should be able to do the flip, but your mind won't let you. You are at odds with yourself. Nothing stands in your way, but you.
The wall can feel insurmountable. As a lifelong athlete, I have pushed myself through many physical challenges. I have run until I have thrown up, and kept running. I have pushed for one final rep while each of my muscle fibers screamed until flatlining into static numbness. I’ve swallowed down vomit in wrestling matches and propped myself up against my practice partners in the final days of a torturous weight cut. I have pushed the heaviest boulders up the hill, but in all of these instances, there was something tangible to push, some kind of force to oppose. There was always the next rep or just one more lap, but with the wall, it’s just you. How the hell do you push yourself up a hill? There is no method to make it easier, no shortcut. You simply stand at the edge of the cliff and you have to tell yourself to jump.
I was a junior in high school when I landed my first backflip. I spent fifteen minutes after every wrestling practice, stacking boxes and backflipping onto soft blue crash pads from decreasing heights. I had good form and could complete the flip onto the crashpad with no added height, but once I stepped out onto the wrestling mat or grass, I just couldn’t do it. Eventually, I resolved that I would get a suitable increase in height if I set the flip with a roundoff, and when I tried it, I flew over my head and landed on my butt. Fuelled with adrenaline, I didn’t even give myself time to think before attempting it from standing, I didn’t land on my feet, but I successfully flipped over my head without crushing my skull. After that, breaking through walls became addicting. I tried front flips, side flips, butterfly twists, full twists, and corkscrews. It wasn’t until later, that I found I could apply my skill for breaking walls outside of acrobatics.
Here’s the thing, like conquering any scary thing, the only solution is to do it. It isn’t helpful or a reassurance to anyone stuck at the wall, but it is the honest, irrefutable truth. Once you do it, however, the wall becomes smaller, and its obstruction to you is lessened by experience. You realize that it only takes one first try, one act of bravery to achieve what you want to achieve, because after that, you’ve opened the box, and the wall will shrink until it disappears for good.
Of course, that isn’t exactly true. While the wall presents itself most blatantly when trying a gravity-defying stunt like a backflip, in which a mistake is indelibly possible and can result in serious injury, it will return in many instances in your life. Before job interviews, deciding on a big move, perhaps on your wedding day; it doesn’t take something as ridiculous as a backflip to make your legs quake, to render you immobile. Instances that can have lasting consequences and decisions that can change the course of your life drastically are where the wall thrives. Although the stakes aren’t as vivid and clear as that of the backflip, the skill by which you overcome the wall transfers. Since teaching myself to do a number of flips and other athletic feats that could present danger, I have confronted many difficult decisions, as we all do in life. I have forced myself to enter situations and interactions in which the wall loomed as large as ever. The act of overcoming the wall is the same every time. It is a decision, a push of some internal, proverbial button, a resolution made of sheer willpower and nothing else. If you can do it for one thing, you can do it for something else.
I often think, funny enough, about the film We’re the Millers, where Jason Sadekis coaches his pretend son on seizing the opportunity to kiss a girl. He tells him, that whenever he is afraid to do something, he simply counts to three, and does it. This ends up not working for baby-faced, wacky-eyebrowed Will Poulter, who has to find the confidence to kiss the girl his own way, but it just goes to show that everyone’s methodology of overcoming the wall will be different. In the end, it is always a miraculous act, pulling will out of the nebulous void of your consciousness.
There are few things more liberating than doing a backflip. Sure it looks really cool and you can impress people with it, and it is a benchmark of physical capability, but the true liberation comes from mastering your fear, from taking control of the self. It comes from looking in the mirror and declaring that you’re in charge. I’m not saying everyone can or should try and do a backflip but I believe that everyone should do things that scare them, things that give them pause. Become addicted to breaking through walls.
Thanks for reading folks, I know this was a bit of a short one today. I am trying to figure out my schedule still and this is all a learning process. I appreciate those of you who have been so gracious as to give up your time to take the journey with me. I’ll write to you all again in two weeks’ time. Maybe with some fiction? Maybe with some comics finally? Who knows! Take care, be good to yourself, and stay hopeful. “This too shall pass.”