How does a skateboard prevent damage when jumping off a high ledge but without it, you’d probably hurt something?
In: 6
If you land and roll away you have to deal with the expected vertical force of landing and that’s it.
If you lose the skate, you have to deal with your forward momentum too, which may be quite big.
So you have to absorb the vertical hit plus horizontal hit and your body was set in a position for the vertical hit only. You touch the ground and your feet are stuck by the compression while your body keeps going forward; you end up having to roll your body on the floor, and it takes time to learn that, the first times you get a lot of bruises. You can easily break an ankle trying to compensate last second. The later you realize you are landing on foot the worse it is.
In parkour you jump with a plan already, all forces accounted for. And of course, having no wheels means you can’t land at skateboard speeds. You gonna jump with less speed and land with less speed. Vertically, you have more room to absorb impacts without a skateboard (you need energy and leg/ankle extensions to be used to control the board, to be subtracted from what you have available to absorb the landing), result is you can land higher jumps without a skate.
Source: engineer and former skateboarder.
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