Personal drills – 2-ways/4-ways to develop your personal skills.

Exit practice – do all the exits in your dive pool at least a couple of times. This will also allow you to see all of the blocks ‘on the hill’, ie, the first few seconds out of the door when the formation is not yet flat.

Random sequences – Sharpening up random work is the quickest way for increasing your 4-way average. (Randoms are single scoring formations.) Random jumps are lots of fun and allow you to develop your team’s natural rhythm.

Drilling blocks – make sure that you create the right pictures for the start of the block, the correct random start leads to a good block. (A block is two or more formations with a set move between them.)

Using the tunnel – great for enhancing personal skills or drilling specific block moves.

Competition draws – normally at the end of your camp. If you can, do the draws with another team to create some friendly rivalry! We would use old draws where we had the scores for the US and Norgie girls; this got the hearts racing!

Debriefing training camps – with your coach to gain direction about what to work on when you return to your home DZ.

Competition Practice
Get some competition practice before the Nationals. Draws in training are no substitute for the real thing. There are lots of FS Grand Prix competitions planned this year with free coaching available, allowing you to experience true competition nerves.

BPA Coaching Roadshows
These develop your personal skills and enable you to meet like-minded people interested in forming teams. If you already have a team, bring along your training plan and use the free advice from our top coaches.

Visit the Nationals DZ
Visit the host DZ before the meet, either a separate weekend or turn up a couple of days before the meet starts. The trip will allow you to check out the facilities, accustom yourself with local boarding procedures, get used to the aircraft and accustom yourself with the landing area. This should make you feel more comfortable allowing you to focus on the competition itself.

Make sure that the last couple of jumps before the competition are ‘feel-good’, upbeat random jumps. The most important thing at this stage is to go into the meet with the right mental attitude, feeling prepared, ready and good about your team.

How Did We Get There?
Having set our goal, we obtained the rules from the BPA, and divided the overall plan into specific challenges. We had personal goals and team goals, and selected the most important.

One Thing at a A Time
The best advice is this: don’t try to fix everything at once – stick with the biggest issue at the moment. Once it’s no longer the biggest thing, move onto the next biggest area, and so on. Design simple, manageable jumps that deal with the immediate challenge.

Our theory was that the first point comes from matching fall rates and having the basic skills. The next few points come from remembering the dive; after that come precision, teamwork, economy, communication; then, keeping it clean and eliminating wasted time. Somewhere – way down the list – is ‘move fast’. We actually worked on slowing down our moves until the very end of the training. Thus ‘dirt-diving slow motion’ was invented.

Some teams dirt-dive using unrealistically fast movement, which can translate into rushed, sloppy moves. Slow motion dirt-diving aims to use really precise moves, then key points instantly so no time is wasted. It results in smoother dives, more economical transitions, instantly keyable points, and heightened awareness.

Choosing Slots
The four slots in a 4-way team are: Outside Centre; Inside Centre; Point; and Tail. The slots refer to the position on exit. Outside Centre tends to be floating and Inside Centre will probably be diving. As you would expect Tail is closest to the aircraft’s tail and Point to the sharp end. The slots define where each person is most likely to be. Generally the two centres set up and key the formations. Tail will mostly be at the back of the formation looking in and Point is at the top, often facing out.

The most experienced jumper should be in either the Outside Centre or Inside Centre position, to control the launches. Beyond that, we figured Inside Centre needs to display awareness and communication, Outside Centre needs to be good at turning, Tail needs to be the quickest, and Point needs to be the most confident. We changed slots at one stage, to fix a launch, and then kept the new arrangement, simply because everybody liked it.

Training Randoms
We kept mainly to the junior dive pool, with the occasional block move just for fun. Everything was launched with minimal gripswitching – one formation is pretty much as easy to launch as another. With a pool of 12 junior random formations, there are 132 moves that can possibly be drawn, sometimes with a choice of ways to do them. So practically every possibility can be trained with 3-point dives, in about a hundred skydives, each jump being done twice. The first time through gives familiarity with the sequence, and the repeat gives an opportunity to hone any aspect. The moves were written down on a grid and ticked off once each had been practiced. If each person learns one thing per jump, then 100 jumps create 400 improvements – that’s one big resulting gain.

We gave every move a score according to subjective difficulty. So Donut to Stairstep Diamond was rated as 1, Donut to Hook was a 3, and so on. Totting up gives a difficulty rating for the jump. We started with low-scoring dives, but eventually tested the most awkward dives that the numbers would provide.

We did about 20 jumps from a SkyVan before agreeing that left-hand door training was essential. A last minute change of training venue to Empuriabrava turned out to be a very canny move. The weather was perfect and the drop zone exceeded our best expectations in getting us in the air in their Otter. 50 training jumps were easy to achieve in a week, with a carefully planned rest schedule that kept energy levels high the whole time.

Setting Realistic Goals
During regular goal sessions, we constructed team ‘plans’ – our contract with each other. Subjects we discussed included; jump numbers per day, arrival time at the dz, time between jumps, packing, meals, even bedtimes – no subject was off-limits. Realism is the key to making this work. The idea is to construct a ‘modus vivendi’ to which everybody can stick, to get through the training on schedule, on good terms and in good condition. Peripheral issues, disagreements, fatigue and misunderstandings simply never interfered with training.

Relishing Challenges
Trying out new things, having ideas and making mistakes – and above all, keeping a good relationship with the sport – are the essence of learning (given due respect to safety, of course). If anybody ever asked ‘Are you sure about this?’, the answer would often be ‘No, but let’s find out and have fun doing it’. Challenges provide rich pickings for those who see them as opportunities.

Thus, we entered the undersubscribed senior category at the Woodmouse Meet, and the result was way beyond expectation. The team learned its first senior blocks on a 20-minute call, dealt with remembering slot-switchers and 12-point jumps, and made first place. Mission Impossible are very proud to share space on the Woodmouse and Andy Kelly trophies with such teams as Mind Games and 4Pak.

Fictional Draw
By the penultimate day in Empuria there were no training objectives left, other than to go faster. We devised some speed drills, involving moving as fast as possible, whilst maintaining precision. The trick is to work really hard on stopping and then make any final adjustments before picking up grips. On the last day we drew a fictional competition against imaginary competitors, producing an average in low double figures.

Nationals 2003
Two weeks later was the Nationals – and what an awesome competition that was, with another record turnout. Flat flying is bigger than ever! Records were broken and broken again, right from round 1. Everything was up for grabs right until the very last round when Mission Impossible actually became Mission Accomplished – magical!

All Disciplines
The above applies to Formation Skydiving (FS). There are similar systems in place for Canopy Formation (CF), Artistic Events (freefly, freestyle and skysurfing) and Classics (style and accuracy). Details are in the Nationals rules, available free from the BPA office.

www.bpa.org.uk