The Basics of Bungee Jumping

You have seen them taking leaps from bridges, cranes and platforms. Diving headfirst into what appears to be a disastrous encounter with the ground and then being “saved” at the last second by the bungee cords attached to their ankles. You may have shaken your head and called them “fools”, or worse, or you may have said to yourself, “Wow! I've got to try that!” If you are one of those who is ready to try it yourself, ready to feel the rush, then you will be happy to know it's not that hard to get started.

There are permanent bungee jump locations in many of the larger cities where you can go most any time of the year to 'take the plunge'. In addition, there are traveling bungee experiences that will eventually come near you. Once you get connected with the place, you may be surprised how easy it is to take your first jump.

Bungee, for the casual jumper, does not require a lot of knowledge of the sport or any personal equipment. All it requires is the courage to jump. The operators of bungee concessions are trained professionals who know the equipment. They have done the “math” and can tell exactly how long a bungee cord needs to be for each individual jumper. Your 'training' will be quite short, just a simple explanation of the procedures and you will most likely be required to sign a disclaimer that explains the parks responsibility, their limits of liability, and acknowledge that you have no known medical conditions that disqualify you from bungee jumping. Your height and weight will then be recorded and you'll be attached to the proper length bungee cord (depending on your size) by a harness. Depending on the bungee concession, you may get a choice between harnesses.

There are two basic types of bungee harnesses to choose from: the ankle harness (both ankles are normally harnessed) and the body harness. Jumping with an ankle harness is what might be considered 'classic' bungee jumping (in almost every case you will also have some type of body harness as a backup but the actual jump and the bounce(s) back up will be by virtue of your ankle harness. If you are pulled back up or lowered to the ground, the body harness will be used).

The body harness (without an ankle harness) will no doubt be less stressful on your ankles and legs and will 'feel' safer for most novices. The body harness may have the bungee cord attached at your stomach or at your back. Then at the end of your free fall, when the bungee cord starts to exert its pull, you will need to be facing up or down depending on where it is attached.

Not to worry, the jump operator will carefully explain this procedure to you before the jump. The bungee concession will, no doubt, have rules about 'how' you are allowed to jump but just for your information, here are some of the various types of jumps: The “swallow dive” is accomplished by leaping away from the platform with your arms stretched out like a bird.

The 'back dive' is much like the back dive you would perform off the high dive at a swimming pool. Jump back and gracefully go into a nose-dive. The 'bat drop' is something you will never be allowed to do at a bungee concession but just for your information, it is a maneuver where you get yourself hanging upside down (like a bat sleeps), hanging from your toes or having a couple amigos hold your ankles and then just drop straight down. The 'elevator drop' is a feet first jump -- you maintain the feet first position until the harness takes over.

Warning: If you are jumping with an ankle harness, the 180-degree flip (when the bungee cord takes over) could exert a lot of force on your ankles and legs and could hurt you). The 'pogo' is really a dangerous maneuver to be used by only the most experienced jumpers. Using an ankle harness, you jump feet first (the elevator drop) but you are holding onto the bungee cord, near the ankle harness.

Ideally, when the bungee cord is fully extended, you will still be in an upright position and will “pogo“ up and down a few times.

The reality is, this maneuver makes it very easy to get hurt (and besides, the bungee concession operators ask you to never touch the bungee cords with your bare hands. For more articles related to this subject and others please visit Extreme Sports Info

The Ultimate in Water Sports Cliff Diving

Those extreme athletes who enjoy cliff diving will be the first ones to tell you to beware of the risks involved and to take this sport seriously. The risks are real and some can be life threatening in nature. Cliff diving is not a sport to enter into lightly and with each turn, the diver knows it could always be their last. Cliff divers exceed 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds. Regardless of the flips and turns they do before entering the water when it is time to plunge, they do so feet first hoping to avoid head and neck injury. When they are entering the water feet, first they are doing so with the bodies perfectly still and rigid.

Anything else could cause life-threatening injuries if not death. To understand the seriousness of this, consider what would happen if the diver were to fall at the wrong time or judge incorrectly their landing. It would be equivalent to falling from a four-story building, head first; you are not going to recover from that type of fall. Cliff divers love Acapulco and the La Quebrada cliffs. When the spectator’s view the distance the divers make from the cliffs, it looks as if there is a very narrow finger of the ocean that comes in to where the cliff divers take their plunge. In this city, they have been diving off cliffs for more than fifty years.

It is an amazing extreme sport to stand upon the cliffs and look down at a very thin slip of water that has a cliff on one side, sharp rocks on the other, and commit to dive into the middle. Jamaica is another favorite place for cliff divers who enjoy the limestone cliffs of Negril’s West End. The only charge that applies for these extreme sports enthusiasts is adrenaline. There is a café for spectators, located 40-feet to 70-feet on the edge of the cliff. California has some great places that draw cliff divers. Gibralter Dam in the Los Padres National Forest has a great place to cliff dive. Divers have their choice from 40-feet to 85-feet to dive from with various hazards attached if they so chose. Box Canyon has cliffs that range from 15-feet to 65-feet with varying degrees of difficulty and is beautiful. There is also a 90-foot jump but the area to run in order to get a good jump is covered with brush.

Santa Paula Canyon Falls also known as the Punch Bowls that extreme cliff divers flock too. The jumps here range from 10-feet to 80-feet. This area is a complex of three waterfalls. These bowls are located in a very narrow canyon that rests in a sandstone gorge. Hawaii hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Tour Final where the finalists performed their magic jumping from 82-foot cliffs into a beautiful ocean below. The cliff diving sport in Hawaii dates back to the 1770s.

Monte-Carlo provided an opportunity for those who visit as well as live there to see the 16 best cliff divers of the world. They held a competition for the first time in more than 300 years of cliff diving history. The cliff divers who are the best of the best have a personality that is very charismatic and who put their lives on the line with every jump, flip, and aerobatic maneuver they create. A professional among cliff divers, Dustin Webster, has been doing this sport for more than twenty years.

Now if you are wondering exactly how high extreme cliff divers dive from consider the highest Olympic level and times it by three and you then have the distance that cliff divers jump from. Once a diver begins their jump, they have two seconds to perform any stunts they have designed. In that two-second window, the divers feel emotions that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum from excitement to fear to relief that they are still alive. Concentration and perfect calculation of the dive is a priority or the diver could receive a fatal if not life threatening injury.

To understand truly how extreme this sport is there are no more 150 professional cliff divers in the world! For more articles related to this subject and others please visit ExtremeSports Info