How long should I be on my belly?

What is ‘belly flying?’

For most, they see it as basic or fundamental. You’ll hear all kinds of answers to this question in both the skydive and tunnel world. You’ll be encouraged to ‘stay on your belly’ or ‘stick to doing belly jumps’ as a new skydiver. We don’t disagree with this sentiment but it does create a stigma that belly flying is somehow lame or un-cool. It also presents ‘belly flying’ as a discipline and this is an area where we’d love to start changing the overall perspective.

Discipline vs. Orientation

‘Belly’ is not a discipline of skydiving, it’s just a general orientation meaning our belly is facing the direction we’re falling. A discipline of freefall is how you use individual bodyflight skills to accomplish group goals. An orientation is simply based on what surface is seeing the relative wind. For example, a skydiver flying a belly slot on an angle jump, a videographer filming a tandem and a competitor flying a round of 4-Way Formation Skydiving (FS) are all ‘belly flying’ but they’re using the position to accomplish very different goals. In the same line of thought a dynamic jump vs a static jump are going to look very different even though the flyers might stay ‘belly to earth’ the entire skydive.

Focus on the maneuvers not the position.

So seriously how long? What’s the right answer?

As long as you can safely fly relative to someone else in the sky or tunnel, there’s nothing wrong with starting to explore different orientations. The challenge here is to do so in way that’s actually productive and doesn’t create any dangerous situations and that’s where you’ll find immense benefits from coaching. An experienced coach will be able to teach you how to plan jumps that allow you to incorporate new maneuvers in different orientations without completely losing relativity. This will create continuity in your progression and you’ll start gaining an understanding of how to build jumps that will ‘scale up’ to the type of flying you really want to be doing.