Armor design v. tailbone

[Colm]

A rather firm landing last week got me thinking about tailbone protection a bit...

I usually see the normal approach to body armor design as this: throw some padding at the vulnerable spot, then cover it with a hard plastic. Seems to work well for knees, elbows, shins, heads, etc... all of which are targets that are attached to the torso via pivot point(s). In other words, if you smack your knee, you rely on the armor to DISPERSE the force of impact, and you rely on body motion, the flexibility of the joint, and the muscles controlling it to ABSORB the force (such as a PLF). Vaguely speaking.

The tailbone is kind of different since it doesn't pivot, and energy is directed up the spine or something breaks. I've looked at pictures of various items claiming to be tailbone protection... azzpads.com, "crashpads," mtn bike armor, etc. All they do is place a pad & triangle of hard plastic over your upper buttcrack.

Dispersing the force in this manner is of course good for hitting pointy rocks, but what about those whopper hits where people break stuff. In this case, wouldn't the benefit of a pad be limited to the crush-absorbing ability of the padding material, which usually isn't much. I guess it helps by making the time duration of the force go from near-instantaneous, to spreading it out over a few fractions of a second? But still, that could be a lot of force being applied to an rigid body part.

So to overcome this, has anybody ever seen an asspad that tries to disperse the force against a tailbone to greater areas of the butt? Contrary to intuition, would something like this require more firm padding over the softer parts such as your buttcheeks, and a relatively soft padding over the tailbone itself, in order to effectively redistribute the energy? If you have the most aggressive padding over the area you are trying to protect, i.e. the coccyx, doesn't that merely channel the energy directly to that target?

Do you agree/disagree wity my above conclusions? Am I just wasting my time in an a$$-obsession?

now I know the cynical among you will just say "work on your damn canopy skills"

I was generally fine afterwards... though lucky, embarassed and frightened at some of the mistakes I made! and now still a little sore so that I don't forget it any time soon.

[BASE_689]

> Do you agree/disagree wity my above conclusions?
Absolutely I agree. But protections are a compromise between "protection" and "wearability".
In my standard BASE jumps I wear: full face helmet (FD), knee/chin (hard) pads, Dainese jacket with (hard) pads on forearm/elbow and shoulder, middle ankle high hiking boots.
This is my MINIMUM configuration of protection (once I jumped with "only" elbow and knee pads and hiking boots, but this was due to "accessability" reasons ).
When I jump something very low and/or with jolly hard landing, to the above protection I add snowboard shorts (with hard plastic on coccyx and side of thighs) and the 7-piece back protection that I zip to my Dainese jacket.
With my FULL body armour as per above I feel very clumsy, furthermore the closure of my chest strap is WAY larger than with "regular" clothes/protections, but I can still manage to move around and jump.
Yes, I agree, a hard plastic piece that would spread the hit to a wide area (let's say, the whole butt area) would help so much in avoiding breakage of tailbone and similar, but few points come to my mind.
1) Does such a protection exist, and who is the manufacturer?
2) I wouldn't use such a setup in 100% of my BASE jumps, rather only in a few "selected" jumps
3) Wearability of such a setup copuld be very arguable, plus there a slight chance that you cannot don properly into your rig, manufactured for your "small yourself".
Protection of coccyx area speaking, please consider that I reach nearly what you are arguing about when I have on my snowboard shorts (just outside my pants) with hard plastic on coccyx and the 7-piece back protection zipped to my Jacket; such a 7-piece back protection is outside the snowboard shorts and (in height) is below the end of coccyx protection (of snowboard shorts) and, yes, if you hit the ground with your àss, it indeed widens the area of impact.
A jacket WITH 7-piece back protextion installed could be a nice compromise between not wearing anything in that region and the "butt hard plastic protection".
Have you ever seen how those 7-piece are made? Try and have a look in the Dainese (or similar companies) website.
P.S.: After having had a chat with a friend of mine, who is a doctor, about the pain I had when I got up (after having been sit for a while) for a whole year (after an offlanding I did on my àss), I realized that I broke my coccyx; my doctor friend said that after ine year that small bnone had finally found its way somewhere and settled there. From that event on, I am even more conservative from (back) protection point of view when I come to jump "hard sites". Just my 0.02€

[Colm]

>
When I jump something very low and/or with jolly hard landing, to the above protection I add snowboard shorts (with hard plastic on coccyx and side of thighs)

That sounds like a few pairs I have seen, that fall victim to the flaws i mentioned. i.e. just protecting the coccyx without being able to divert force away from it. Though obviously far better than nothing! If you don't mind me asking, did you sample various brands of snowboard shorts before deciding on that pair? how wide is the plastic part?

I'd like to take snowboard pants like that and see what happens when I put thick plastic over the glutes, and absorbent padding over the coccyx, so that the glute armor sticks out further and take the brunt of the force.

> With my FULL body armour as per above I feel very clumsy, furthermore the closure of my chest strap is WAY larger than with "regular" clothes/protections, but I can still manage to move around and jump.
Yes, I agree, a hard plastic piece that would spread the hit to a wide area (let's say, the whole butt area) would help so much in avoiding breakage of tailbone and similar, but few points come to my mind.

1) Does such a protection exist, and who is the manufacturer?

I haven't found a single source yet. I'd like to.. I've fabricated a few cardboard and bubble-wrap monstrosities in the meantime, hehe

2) I wouldn't use such a setup in 100% of my BASE jumps, rather only in a few "selected" jumps

How about, perhaps, low exits over concrete surfaces? That's what the majority of them are over here. On a soft or water landing I wouldn't be as concerned either, but I haven't found any sadly.

3) Wearability of such a setup copuld be very arguable, plus there a slight chance that you cannot don properly into your rig, manufactured for your "small yourself".

Quite true. Being skinny, I can usually afford a few extra inches of padding around my skeleton, and since my objects have spacious access and straightforward landing areas, I figure I'm better off trading some flex for some padding. There are some other tighter exits, but I don't do those yet

Protection of coccyx area speaking, please consider that I reach nearly what you are arguing about when I have on my snowboard shorts (just outside my pants) with hard plastic on coccyx and the 7-piece back protection zipped to my Jacket; such a 7-piece back protection is outside the snowboard shorts and (in height) is below the end of coccyx protection (of snowboard shorts) and, yes, if you hit the ground with your àss, it indeed widens the area of impact.

So if I read your right, you have a double plastic layer over your coccyx (snowboard pants, and back protector). How would you feel about such a setup, if compared to the one I described above, switching the snowboard pants parts around?

A jacket WITH 7-piece back protextion installed could be a nice compromise between not wearing anything in that region and the "butt hard plastic protection".
Have you ever seen how those 7-piece are made? Try and have a look in the Dainese (or similar companies) website.

Yeah, I've got a RockGardn jacket but I am a little too tall for it. The back protection, 7 piece overlapping plastic, looks like it would be great...if it didn't stop at my lumbar section! That is almost scarier than no back protection, if I hit the wrong way I can see it thrusting into my lower back. yikes.

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I'd like to find a pair of snowboard pants like yours and maybe experiment with them a bit.

[BASE_689]

> did you sample various brands of snowboard shorts before deciding on that pair?
No, I went straight on to Dainese snowboard shorts (I bought Dainese jacket + knee/shin protection earlier). I saw they had a coccyx protection, as well as hard plastic on lateral of thighs and I thought it was enough.

> how wide is the plastic part?
Yes, you are right, the hard plastic part is semi-rectangular and yes, it is quite small, it covers just the coccyx.

> I'd like to take snowboard pants like that and see what happens when I put thick plastic over the glutes, and absorbent padding over the coccyx, so that the glute armor sticks out further and take the brunt of the force.
Yes, if you have the right tools and the right materials for such a mod, give it a try!!!

> How about, perhaps, low exits over concrete surfaces?
Exactly. It is the type of objects where I wear my FULL body armour

> you have a double plastic layer over your coccyx (snowboard pants, and back protector).
Yes, being small the hard plastic onto the snowboard shorts and being large the hard plastic on the 7-piece back protection.
They end up (in heigth towards the bottom, I mean) at about the same height (when about to finish dressing up, with my hand I slightly pull up the hard plastic of snowboard shorts in order it to stay "within" the large plastic of the 7-piece protection).

> How would you feel about such a setup, if compared to the one I described above, switching the snowboard pants parts around?
I didn't understand the part "switching the snowboard pants parts around" (sorry, I am not a native speaker of English language), but I can tell you that with snowboard shorts AND the 7-piece back protector (integrated in the jacket) I feel jolly fùcking good protected!!!
What I missed to mention, in my above post, is that im my aggressive jumps, beyond the above, I wear also a pair of ankle protections (ankle braces?), not hard but with straps and whatever, once tightened properly, they do not allow lateral movements, only back and forth movements. Jolly clumsy to walk around (very small movements on ankles are possible, in any direction), yes, but I do not have to run the marathon!!!

> ...7 piece overlapping plastic, looks like it would be great...if it didn't stop at my lumbar section!
Well, my 7-piece stops (roughly) at mid-butts, when everything is in place, it stops where the (small) hard plastic of snowboard shorts stops.

> I'd like to find a pair of snowboard pants like yours and maybe experiment with them a bit.
Definitely, I think that snowboard shorts AND 7-piece back protection are quite a good protection indeed.