According to the Department of Health, 101 of our citizens die per year as a direct result of falls, and 71% of those that die are 65 or older.

Kupuna Aikido was formed to reduce deaths and injuries to our Kupuna.
We are a 501(3) c non profit corporation formed in April of 2018. We included "Aikido" in our name because our Directors have a combined history of over 350 years of Aikido training. Our mission is to use our training to teach out Kupuna HOW to fall in such a way as to reduce or prevent injury. To our knowledge, we are the ONLY group that teaches Senior Citizens how to fall.
We have graduated 732 students, and the best of our knowledge, NONE have died as a result of a fall.

In planning our classes, we realized that the traditional "martial arts" way of falling was not appropriate for senior citizens. It requires far too much training to do it effectively and safely. So we chose instead to teach a "Log Rolling" technique where the student lowers their center of gravity, extend their body horizontally as much as possible, extend one arm to protect their face and head, and MOST IMPORTANTLY rotate their body along the "head to heel" axis. The impact is thus spread along the side of their body, starting from outside the calf muscles, and moving upward along the thigh, buttox, and finally the upper shoulder muscles.

In volleyball, the "pancake dig" is very similar to what we teach for the forward fall.

During a backward fall, the student is taught to lower their bodies as much as possible, extend one arm in the direction of the fall at above shoulder height. This will automatically cause the body to rotate so the impact will be along the side of the body instead the back of the head.

In addition to our classes, we have a 50 minute presentation in which we cover the basics of fall prevention, and demonstrate how to fall.
We have given this presentation to 2354 people in person, and about 500 via zoom.