Hey Earl Strassberger,
Nobody plans to crash.
But loose gravel on a corner you've ridden a hundred times. A car door opening at exactly the wrong moment. A patch of wet paint on a roundabout. A dog that appears from nowhere at speed. Any of these can turn an ordinary ride into something you weren't expecting, in a fraction of a second and with no warning at all.
This isn't the email anyone wants to write or read. But it's one of the most genuinely useful ones in this entire series because the difference between a minor tumble and a serious injury is often not a matter of luck. It's knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind, what to do in the half-second before you hit the ground.
Let's talk about it.
⚠️ FIRST: THE GOAL ISN'T ALWAYS TO STAY ON THE BIKE
This is the mindset shift that matters most, and it runs counter to every instinct a cyclist has.
When the bike starts going out from under you, everything in your body screams: save it. Fight it. Stay upright. And so riders throw their weight, grabbing the bars, stiffening every muscle right up until the moment the ground arrives anyway, but now at a worse angle and with more tension in all the places that are about to take impact.
Here's the hard truth: once a crash is unavoidable, fighting it often makes it worse. The energy has to go somewhere. A rider who goes down relaxed disperses that energy across their body and the road surface differently than one who goes down rigid and resisting.
The mental shift worth making, ideally now, while you're reading this calmly, not in the moment, is this: if it's going to happen, your job is no longer to stay on the bike. Your job is to protect yourself on the way down.
That shift, made in advance, can change what your body does when the moment arrives.
🫁 STAY LOOSE — EVEN WHEN EVERY INSTINCT SAYS BRACE
The body's automatic response to falling is to tense up. Every muscle tightens. The jaw clamps. The arms lock. The core braces hard. This is ancient wiring the brain doing its best to protect the body from a threat it perceives in the only way it knows how.
The problem is that rigid muscles and locked joints don't absorb impact. They transfer it straight to the bone and cartilage underneath.
A relaxed body, by contrast, acts more like a crumple zone. Muscles that have some give in them absorb and disperse force rather than concentrating it. Joints that aren't locked have a range of motion that can redirect impact. It's the same principle that makes a drunk driver more likely to walk away from a crash than a tensed-up sober one, not a recommendation for the former, but a useful illustration of the physics.
You can't fully override the tensing instinct in the moment. But you can reduce it. Riders who've practised falling in martial arts, in skills coaching sessions, or through simple low-speed drills often report that their bodies respond differently to unexpected moments on the bike because they've rehearsed a different default. The "stay loose" instruction becomes less of a thought and more of a trained response.
I had a low-speed tumble a few years ago, clipping out too slowly at a junction. Embarrassing rather than dangerous. But I noticed my body had instinctively tried to catch itself with fully extended arms and my wrist paid the price for a week afterwards. After that, I spent a few minutes thinking through what I'd do differently. It sounds small. It changed how my body responded the next time something unexpected happened on the bike.
🚫 NEVER CATCH YOURSELF WITH STRAIGHT ARMS
This is the single most important technical point in this email, so it's worth being direct about it.
The most common serious cycling injury pattern goes like this: rider falls, rider instinctively throws both arms out with locked elbows to stop the fall, the force of the impact travels straight up the rigid arm and into the wrist, collarbone, or shoulder. Broken wrists, fractured collarbones, and shoulder separations are the predictable results of a very human, very understandable reaction that makes the injury significantly worse.
The collarbone, in particular, has an almost legendary status among cyclists for this exact reason. It's not a fragile bone. But it's positioned to absorb the redirected force of an outstretched arm impact in a way that makes it vulnerable. Many experienced cyclists who've broken theirs will tell you the moment of impact felt almost inevitable in retrospect, they felt themselves falling, they put out a straight arm, and the rest wrote itself.
The alternative is to keep the elbows bent on the way down, even slightly. This is difficult to do on instinct. It helps to have thought about it beforehand, because the brain processes stored intentions faster than it generates new responses under stress. You're not going to remember to think about elbow position mid-fall. But you might remember a rule you've already internalised.
Bent elbows. Not a full catch. A controlled, slightly softened landing. It won't eliminate injury risk, but it changes the physics of impact in your favour.
🥋 TUCK AND ROLL — IT'S NOT JUST FOR MARTIAL ARTS
If you've ever watched a judoka fall, you've seen what skilled falling looks like. No wrists extended, no stiff arms, no concentrated impact at a single point. Instead, the whole body rolls with the momentum, chin tucked, shoulder leading, energy spread across a larger surface area and a longer distance. The ground receives them. They don't crash into it.
The tuck-and-roll principle applies to cycling falls too, particularly when there's forward momentum involved rather than a simple sideways tip.
The key elements are:
Tuck the chin. This protects the back of the head from striking the ground and keeps the neck from snapping back on impact. It's the most important single thing you can do with your head position in a fall.
Lead with the shoulder, not the hand. Let the shoulder take the initial contact rather than the outstretched arm. The shoulder can absorb impact better than the wrist and collarbone, and leading with it initiates a natural rolling motion.
Let the body roll rather than stop. If you're moving forward and hit the ground with a soft shoulder lead, the body will naturally want to roll over. Let it. A roll spreads the impact energy over time and distance rather than concentrating it at a single point.
This won't apply to every fall. Some crashes are too sudden, too constrained by traffic, or too low-speed for any technique to be relevant. But for mid-speed tumbles with forward momentum, the kind that often happen on descents or at corners, the tuck-and-roll instinct, trained in advance, can make a meaningful difference.