The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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A cope? What am I coping with? Extra convenience and comfort? It would be a cope if I had brain damage from smacking into a tree with no helmet that a helmet would have prevented. That said I think they may be of some help in avoiding skull or skin injuries to the back of the head for slowboarders like yourself.
Snowboarders tend to spend a lot more time on their backs and close to the hardpack and tend to tip over backward and give their noggin a good smack. But unless you're hitting your head so hard that you're fracturing your skull and exposing your brain directly to the groomer you're on, that concussion comes from your brain bouncing off of the inside of your skull from stopping fast, not from hitting the snow itself.
"Results from the four studies8,9,12,13 evaluated show slightly varying results with the majority of the studies trending toward no difference in head injury occurrence when the snow sport participants are either helmeted or not helmeted. According to Dickson and Terwiel,8 head injury rates did not differ by helmet use status. Porter et al.’s9 study demonstrated that helmeted participants were more likely to suffer an intracranial hemorrhage, but less likely to sustain a skull fracture or scalp laceration"
Without going into every study in that review, the obvious flaw is: people who aren't injured don't show up in the data. They're taking people who already have a head injury, and then noting helmet or no helmet.
Yeah, you're still going to have a bad time if you accelerate your head into something solid at a high enough speed, but given that it might happen, I'm 100% going to choose to put foam and plastic in the way to dissipate the impact. If you had to fall onto groomed snow and land on your head, say from a standing position, not even at speed, and I offer you the choice of wearing a helmet or not, would you really prefer not to wear one?
But as some studies have shown I'm less likely to hit my head in the first place due to overall awareness and a sort of "I'm safe to take risks" feeling from using a safety device like a helmet. Yeah if you're going to hit me in the head I would rather wear a helmet, but the odds of you connecting are less if I'm not. Skulls are built to dissipate force as well, it is just a lot uglier than if the helmet does it.
Interesting quote from an article citing an ongoing meta study, "Studies show that helmets reduced non-serious head injuries, such as minor concussions, by nearly 70 percent in the 17 seasons between 1995 and 2012. But to Shealy’s amazement, there was no change in the number of fatalities. “The question became,”he says, “Why aren’t helmets saving people’s lives?”"
"In the early ‘90s, only about 5 percent of skiers used helmets. Flash forward 20 years, and nearly 80 percent of snow riders opt-in." With no reduction in fatal head injuries.
So I think that strikes a nice middle ground with what we are both saying here. I ski at a pace where a fatal mistake is a fatal mistake. Yes a helmet could mitigate some minor injuries, but who is to say I would even have been in a place to be protected from those if I wasn't wearing it?
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