In nature, many animals dive into water at high speeds; e.g. human diving from cliffs, plunge diving birds, and aquatic animal porpoising and breaching. Especially for humans, extreme sports such as cliff diving or high diving provide excitement, but can be close to the limit of body injuries. For animals, high dives can provide opportunities to find prey, move at high speed, escape from predators, or communicate providing a benefit to the diver despite the potential risk of injury. Because most human diving-related injuries happen during the impact phase, we focus on the dynamics of the water entry, where the unsteady liquid forces are dominant and dependent on the shape of the body. Simplified concave and convex shapes, and 3D-printed elaborate models based on the head and body designs of animals were dropped from a height of 20 – 60 cm into water to explore a functional relationship between the body shape and the force. The water-entry dynamics were recorded with a high-speed video camera and the impact force was measured from a force transducer. We show that the impulse due to impact, which incorporates the relevant timescale of unsteady forces, varies across the different diving forms and can be responsible for muscle/bone injuries. As such, this study presents a mechanics-based understanding for high diving of animals with various shapes.