In reply to John_Warner:
The mentality during falling thing is to train your brain so it's in a better state before falling, so you're then less likely to fall because you're not scared of it and so climb better. I think if you relax you're not absorbing the shock with your muscles, but you can use the general content of your body, which is water. They use water bags to absorb the impact of explosions in demolitions and stuff, so it's surprisingly effective.
But yes, it all seems like so much advice to sport climbers and wall bunnies, and they should have linked to planet fear's article on dynamic belaying:
http://www.planetfear.com/article_detail.asp?a_id=476
I don't think my mate the other day was thinking `Ooh I'm not scared' when he tried to down climb and grab a nut and it moved. He actually managed to get down cleanly because he was so scared. And me falling off wouldn't have been a terrbily good idea at certain points last night either.
But bizarrely, sort of like when you're pissed and don't break anything, if you are going to deck out, I think you should still relax, bend your knees, crumple your whole body and try to roll into it (I haven't worked out how to roll and protect my spine because thankfully I haven't had to do it very often, I don';t think this is that easy to do in a climbig situation). Even then in general you should probablu pick your landing - landing in a tree at Buoux saved Lynn Hill's life once.
So in order to achieve this end, rather than concentrating on all this breathing in and learning, when it does happen, if I'm gonna fall from moderate heights soloing (e.g. because my hand's pinged) I've even been able to jump into the fall and control the trajectory - i.e. you don't want to be spinning wildly, let alone landing on your head (though I take massive spannerign oens like this bouldering, even thogh i've not tried L'helicopter). I usually just accept it, resign myself to my fate because I know there's nothing I can do to stop it, maybe breath then just drop and collapse into the fall. And like I said, Arno doesn't say specifically how to do this deliberately.
This will be subject to change after I break the first bone in my body.