This case is different in an important way. Most people will go inside during a thunderstorm and check for cars before crossing a street, so avoiding these risks doesn’t require an unusual degree of vigilance. katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor in avoiding death or serious injury. If that’s true, then we should expect to hear about people dying due to inadequate situational awareness fairly often because most people don’t have above average situational awareness.
However, I think this is possibly explained by the fact that people with good situational awareness are far more likely to place themselves in situations were good situational awareness is required.
katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor
I took “good situational awareness” to mean ‘a level of SA unusual among readers of this posts’, which I guess is a lower standard than ‘unusual among the population’, e.g. because of this.
Special case of situational awareness: I read a discussion among martial arts students of whether they’d ever found their art useful. About half of them said they’d been avoided getting hurt from falling. (Sorry, no cite, but it was on usenet.)
Note that falling safely when expecting to be thrown is not the same as landing safely when falling unexpectedly. The latter is probably a special skill, not specifically trained for in martial arts. Here is some discussion:
Breakfalling may even help you get through a training session where you get tossed around a 100 times or more. But, when you slip and fall off the mat your training will most likely not kick in and save you.
This case is different in an important way. Most people will go inside during a thunderstorm and check for cars before crossing a street, so avoiding these risks doesn’t require an unusual degree of vigilance. katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor in avoiding death or serious injury. If that’s true, then we should expect to hear about people dying due to inadequate situational awareness fairly often because most people don’t have above average situational awareness.
However, I think this is possibly explained by the fact that people with good situational awareness are far more likely to place themselves in situations were good situational awareness is required.
I took “good situational awareness” to mean ‘a level of SA unusual among readers of this posts’, which I guess is a lower standard than ‘unusual among the population’, e.g. because of this.
Special case of situational awareness: I read a discussion among martial arts students of whether they’d ever found their art useful. About half of them said they’d been avoided getting hurt from falling. (Sorry, no cite, but it was on usenet.)
http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/can-martial-arts-falling-techniques.html may be a useful starting point for further research.
Thanks very much.
Note that falling safely when expecting to be thrown is not the same as landing safely when falling unexpectedly. The latter is probably a special skill, not specifically trained for in martial arts. Here is some discussion:
I don’t actually think that’s thanks to situational awareness but rather from drilling breakfalls a lot.