My frickin' neck hurts

Though my title does leave the door open for many, many a gay joke, the real reason I'm complaining is that my neck is legitimately the sorest it's been in recent memory, and it's all thanks to a crazy new exercise at kungfu. We're doing rolls, i.e. somersaults, and rolling for a few minutes can get you very dizzy. But that's not why my neck hurts. Rolling is easy. Break falls, not so easy.

A break fall is when you drop to the ground (or at my level, hurl yourself at the ground) and twist to one side or another and slap the ground in timing with your landing to that the impact is spread across more area and does less damage. This sounds weird, but it does work well and I have years of being tossed around like a rag doll as experience to prove it. Another important detail it to keep your head from hitting the ground, so you carefully keep your neck tense to avoid clunking into the ground with your skull. Fun. So what do break falls have to do with rolls?

Simple: our new exercise routine is to roll up and back down our mat many times to get good and dizzy. Then we roll once then break fall and repeat on both sides. And there's more than one kind of break fall: there's side, back, and front break falls. Each of them is difficult in its own way, but when you combine them with rolling it gets more complicated. For my low level kungfu class, this is less of a concern because I get a nice break in between roll sets. For my advanced kungfu class, which typically consists of just me, I get to roll and break fall for about eight to ten solid minutes. That many breakfalls and rolling leads directly to neck pain.

So my neck hurts. I get dizzy a lot in class. At least it's entertaining!