I base. I've based for eight years, most days, in Bali. Which means I've flown maybe forty people and based several hundred.
And there's a thing that happens at every jam: certain flyers, everyone wants to base. Not the lightest ones. Not the most flexible ones. Certain ones. Word gets around, and by hour two they've got a queue.
It took me years to work out what those flyers were actually doing. So here it is, from the other side of the feet.
It is almost never about weight
Let's kill this one first, because it stops people flying.
I have based people who weigh 45kg and finished exhausted after four minutes. I have based people 30kg heavier and stayed up comfortably for twenty. The difference wasn't mass. It was whether the weight was organised.
A flyer who holds structure feels like a plank. A flyer who doesn't feels like a bag of water — the load keeps shifting, and I'm chasing it with my legs the whole time. That's what makes basing tiring. Not kilos.
So if you've been telling yourself you're too heavy to fly, please stop. You're not. You might just be soft.
Tension is the whole game
If you take one thing from this: a flyer's job is to be one piece.
Hollow body. Ribs down, glutes on, legs together, toes pointed, a gentle brace through the middle. Not rigid — rigid is its own problem — but connected. Head to heels, one object.
When you're one object, I can balance you the way you'd balance a broom on your palm. Small corrections, predictable response. When you're several loosely-related objects, every correction I make sets off a chain reaction somewhere else in your body, and neither of us can find the point.
Most flyers think they need more flexibility. They almost always need more tension.
Stop fixing things mid-pose
This is the one I'd most like flyers to hear.
You're up, something feels slightly off, and you make a small adjustment to correct it. Reasonable instinct. But from underneath, I was already correcting for that exact thing — and now we're both correcting, in opposite directions, and the pose collapses.
If something feels off, hold your shape and say it. "I'm drifting left." I'll fix it. I can see and feel things you can't from up there, and my corrections are a lot cheaper than yours.
Hold. Speak. Let the base drive.
Commit to the entry
Half-committed entries are harder and more dangerous than full ones.
When you lean in tentatively, your weight arrives slowly and unpredictably, and I have to guess where it's going. When you commit, I know exactly what's coming and when. Committed is safer. It feels like the opposite, which is why it takes trust to learn.
This is also why spotting matters so much early on — not because you're likely to fall, but because knowing someone's there is what lets you actually commit instead of hedging.
The FlyCarian™ is worn by the flyer for exactly this reason — it gives trained spotters something solid to work with during appropriate progressions, so you can commit to a skill before you fully own it.
Say what you feel, not what you think
"I feel wobbly" tells me nothing. "I'm falling forward" tells me everything.
Good flyers narrate sensation, not diagnosis. You don't need to know why something's happening — that's my problem. Just tell me what direction it's going and I'll handle the rest.
And say it early. The moment you notice, not once it's already going.
Learn to land before you learn to fly
Falling is part of it. Every flyer comes down unexpectedly at some point.
Practise stepping down cleanly from low positions. Learn to find your feet. Learn to go loose and roll rather than sticking a limb out to stop yourself — straight arms into the ground is how wrists get hurt.
And a specific one: if you're coming down, let go of me. The instinct is to grab. Grabbing pulls the base off balance and turns a controlled dismount into two people falling.
Trust is built in reps, not conversations
You can't talk your way into trusting a base. You get there by doing small things repeatedly until your nervous system stops flagging them as dangerous.
Fly low things with a new partner. Fly them a lot. Build up. The flyers everyone wants to base are usually just the ones who've put in more reps of the boring stuff, and it shows as calm.
If you're new to the vocabulary any of this uses, Acro Lingo 101 covers the terms.
One thing bases owe you back
This cuts both ways, so let me be fair.
A base who's fighting their own body is not a stable platform, however good your technique is. If your base is shaking, cutting sessions short, or bailing on skills, that's often hamstrings and lower back rather than unwillingness.
Ask. Most bases won't volunteer it.
The short version
Be one piece. Hold your shape and talk instead of fixing it yourself. Commit to entries. Say what you feel early. Learn to land. Let go on the way down. Put in the boring reps.
Do that and you'll never wait for a base again.
Related reading: L-Basing 101 · The spotter's guide to safety · FlyCarian™ Spotting Belt