Freefly Fundamentals - How to Sit Fly

So this is something that you will learn first up when beginning to free fly. G'day guys, I'm Chico from Focus. Today we're going to talk about sit flying or head up orientation. Head up is a free fly position so we are falling at faster speeds. It is very similar to the back fly position which we've spoken about before. Please check out our last video on back flying and you'll get some good tips to get set up to start sit flying. Obviously we're falling at faster speeds now, free fly speeds, so we need to be able to recover onto our back. This is what we call the recovery position, which is why we went through and spoke about back flying in the previous video. All right, so now we're going to talk about the position itself. We'll start from the top and work our way down. So with our head, we want to try and keep our head back on the wind a little bit as well. Try and avoid pushing our head forward. Our shoulders are down and back so that we can feel the wind on our back. With our arms, we want to maintain a little bit of pressure with our arms on the wind, but not too much so that we're pushing down on the wind. Can have them slightly relaxed so that we're not too rigid through the arms. Keep maintaining that upper body leaning back on the wind to help maintain a bit of lift and prevent us backsliding. In the sky guys, the rig comes off our back in the head up position and does give us a little bit of backwards movement, so we need to be a bit more positive in leaning back with our upper body to cancel that out. And then working down towards the hips, this is where we need to be quite strong, ensuring that we keep those hips back throughout our sort of head up position so that we can maintain a good positive position with the upper body. Moving down to the legs, we need to maintain a little bit of downwards pressure with the legs and the best way to fly this leg position is basically thinking about 90 degree bends in our knees and up towards our hip, allowing us to be in a nice neutral orientation. At the same time, we want to keep our toes up and not let our feet come backwards too far underneath our upper legs, so keeping a little bit of forwards pressure with the feet. And then the last thing is just pulling our knees in slightly and opening outwards a little bit with the feet so that we're creating a little bit of lift with the lower leg. So that's a breakdown of the position, now we'll talk about how we move. So thinking about the position we described, for us to be able to move forwards, one thing we can do is just lean back with our upper body a little bit more, which is going to help give us a little bit of forwards drive. Another method we can use is just with our lower legs. So from the knee, basically just extending our feet forward slightly whilst maintaining a little bit of downwards pressure with the legs so that we don't let the legs come up. All right, now we're going to talk about up and down or slow and fast fall. So basically to slow down, all we need to do is basically open up our feet and pinch inwards with the knees so that we create more surface area on the legs. At the same time, you want to lean back on the wind a little bit as well to add a little bit of lift with the upper body. That's going to give us more lift and slow us down or slow down our fall rate. To come down or to speed up, what we want to do is just reduce the surface area. So the way that we can do that is basically bring our legs closer together and make sure that our legs are nice and vertical. And then at the same time, we can relax our arms slightly and just make sure that our upper body is nice and vertical. The next thing we're going to talk about is how we break off or track off when we're in a sit-fly jump or sit-fly position. What we want to do is basically just control our transition onto our back by just reducing the surface area of our upper body, de-arching the chest and then simply keeping our legs bent so that we maintain a small position with our legs so that we can ease ourself onto our back. Once we get onto the back, then we can extend our legs and start to backtrack. From there, once we've cleared the airspace above us, then we simply roll over onto our belly nice and quickly so that we can then clear the space below us and get ready to obviously stall out and open our parachute. All right, that's the basics of sit-flying. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next video. See you then.