Risk verses reward is something that every action sports athlete has to deal with every time they compete or practice. It just comes with the territory and we aren’t talking about “will Billy still be my friend if I talk to Sally” kind of risk verses reward that most people struggle with on a day to day basis. I’m talking more about conversations like “if I try this and it goes wrong how hurt could I get? Will I die? What is the pay off if I succeed?” this is the kind of decision that most people spend their entire lives trying to avoid but one that action sports athlete’s face on almost a daily basis.
Looking back over my life and career in FMX I have taken some pretty damn big risks, most of them paid off, others did not and I inevitably suffered the consequences. Even so, I think I got off pretty light. The biggest lesson I learnt out of all of it was coming to understand what risk actually is, a variable that can be controlled. Understanding it as a variable enables you to take steps to control and minimize it, both immediately during the action and in the preparation to the action.
Take for example when I was first learning to backflip. I could have just tried to dirt not knowing what I was doing, (which I kind of did back in 02, but we won’t talk about that), or I could have taken steps to make sure I knew what I was doing building up to it, to minimize the risk of failure when I finally took the backflip to dirt. This is in fact what I did. Starting with BMX into a foam pit I learnt about the rotation, how to pull and started to understand how to control the spin. Next step was a foam pit on my FMX bike getting the courage to actually pull back over 75 ft and hope it comes around. Once I knew I could rotate it was time to regress slightly and spend a day on the trampolines flipping every which way, forwards, backwards, sideways etc. This made sure I had air sense; I knew where I was in the rotation at all times so I would be able to tell if I needed to speed up or slow down the rotation. The next day, a couple more flips into the foam pit just to make sure I had the pull action fresh in my mind and then I took it to dirt.
The first, and every, backflip to dirt is just as dangerous if something went wrong regardless of preparation. If I under or over rotated I was going just as fast, just as high and would have hit the ground with the exact same force. The thing I changed with preparation was reducing the probability of error because of the actions I had taken leading up to it. This is something that needs to be considered at all times. Ask yourself, not have I reduced the risk, because the risk is always there, but have I taken steps to reduce the margin of error that I am likely to make for this particular action?
Reducing the factor of error is how the best complete seemingly impossible tasks and why experience almost always trumps youthful exuberance. Take someone like Robbie Maddison for example; Maddo had ridden bikes from an early age, building skill over time racing as a junior before moving into FMX later in life. He has done jumps and stunts that people see as impossible but that is because they see the final product, not the error mitigation and preparation that goes into it. I remember him telling me his idea about the Arc De Triomphe jump and I thought he was mad, I believed in him but I thought he was mad. From there he worked to create a way to build up and make sure that he had greatly reduced the possibility of error and he then completed the jump safely. The risk still existed but the chance of falling outside of the safe zone of operation had greatly reduced.
Now you might be wondering why I’m talking about bikes so much and not about training well that is because the level of preparation required for high level activities in action sports moves well beyond just ‘skill learning’ and has a high demand for physical preparation. With learning to backflip, if physically weak I may have had, let’s say a 10% ‘safe’ zone. This means I needed to perform the manoeuvre within 10% of being absolutely perfect to ride away safely. Now if I was physically fit and had been training, which I had, that safe zone may have increased to 25 or even 30%. This meant I could make a bigger error on the skill side and still get away with it. This also made allowances for factors like hesitation from fear and a whole heap of less controllable variables that may have cause an accident in the untrained individual.
Another example of this is Maddo’s Arc jump. He did make a mistake, he went a little too fast on the drop causing him to land at the bottom of the transition. If you have not watched it, you can see it here. The impact he sustained was so immense that most riders would have just crumbled, but he was able to ride out of it. This was not just because of his skill as a rider but also because of his physical strength and training that went into the preparation. This preparation enabled Rob to get away with something that could have potentially killed him.
At this stage, you are probably thinking ‘cool stories Cam but what’s the point?’ Well the moral is strength training, particularly in high-risk action sports, is so important. Not just for the performance advantages but the risk mitigation, the injury mitigation and even the mental component. If you are strong physically and have faith that your body can withstand the impacts and strain you are going to put it through then you are going to be more confident in all you do. This will reduce hesitation, lessen the chance of making potentially life-threatening errors and allow you to achieve more.
Train hard, be safe.
Your strength coach,
Cam
