Jump Rope Videos

Here is some more video from the 1999 World Championships in St. Louis. As I said before, I was very fortunate to have some truly amazing teammates. Here is the single rope freestyle routine from Shaun Hamilton and Willie Amos. Both are very gifted athletes. Shaun is now the head coach of the USA Jump Rope All Star Team and Willie played football for Nebraska and is now a professional football player for the Chicago Bears organization in NFL Europe.

Labels: All-Star, Champion, Jump Rope, single rope, USAJR, Video

As you know, jump rope is an excellent exercise. Many people workout with a jump rope to lose weight. I’ve seen it claimed that you can burn up to 1000 calories an hour by jumping rope. That’s probably only realistic if you weigh 220 lbs. You can find out how many calories you burn based on your weight and the time you spend jumping using this nifty calories burned estimator from healthstatus.com. To lose one pound you must burn 3,500 calories more than you take in.

Jump Rope is also used heavily as a cross training tool for other sports. Many professional athletes use jump rope to improve their endurance, agility, and coordination. Boxing is probably the most often cited example of a sport that uses jump rope as part of it’s training regimen. Even undefeated boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. jumps rope as seen in this video:

The next stop on our tour of rope skipping from around the world is Germany. This jump rope video is of a performance by Sebastian Deeg of Rent A Sportstar. Sebastian’s solo rope skipping demonstration is just one of many acts that Rent A Sportstar offers as entertainment for charity, advertising, or corporate events.

Here’s another Jump Rope Video from Japan. This is team Kurui. I’m really impressed with the Double Dutch routines that I’ve seen coming out of Japan.

This is our first viewer submitted Jump Rope Video. This video was taken at the 3rd Annual All-Star Workshop Staff Show. Thanks to Becky Zelewski for sending the video.

Today’s jump rope video is of Justin Meier the 2006 Grand National Champion in Male Three Minute Speed. Justin won with a score of 900. That’s only 8 jumps shy of the national record set by Veyom Bahl in 2004. Justin averaged 5 jumps a second over three minutes which is very amazing.

If you are working on speed, pay very close attention to the form that Justin uses while he jumps. He leans slightly forward, his arms are at his waist. He makes small tight circles with his wrists and his feet barely come off the ground.

Nice work Justin!

Today I’m pleased to bring you our first look at the 2007-2009 USA Jump Rope All Star Team. USA Jump Rope has put together a very exciting video to try to get people pumped about the sport. I think they did an excellent job. Operations Manager John Fletcher deserves a big THANK YOU and a pat on the back for filming, editing, and providing us with this awesome video.

There is a longer version of the video on the USA Jump Rope website that gives a more complete introduction of the individual team members. A link to the extended video can be found at the very bottom of the All-Star Team page.

Enjoy!

In 1999 I had the privilege to jump for Team USA at the World Championships in St. Louis, Missouri. I was lucky to be placed on a team with Shaun Hamilton, Willie Amos, and Cliff Forbes. All three of them were amazing athletes. As you may know Shaun went on to become a board member for USA Jump Rope and is now the head coach of the USAJR All-Star team. Willie was an excellent football player. He played for Nebraska and was signed last year by the Chicago Bears to play in NFL Europe.

To say I was fortunate to have such great teammates would be an understatement. They were very easy to work with and picked up the routines very fast. We all had to learn fast… we had very short notice that we would be jumping together and were only able to hold three practices together before heading to the competition. Considering we lived six hours away from each other, I’m surprised we were able to get even that much practice in. In the end we ended up winning the all-male senior division. It remains one of my proudest accomplishments, but most of the credit belongs to my extremely talented teammates.

Have you ever been at a tourist attraction or sporting event or festival of some kind and stumbled upon a random jump rope performance? I’m not talking about the kind of jump rope performance that is typical for our sport, but more of a side show acrobat style of performance. It’s happened to me a few times. It always serves to remind me that there are many different styles of jumping out there.

I didn’t have a good category for this type of video. I don’t really consider it performance art like Cirque Du Soleil, so the best I could come up with was “Side Show”. I think I’ll stick with that for now unless someone else has a better suggestion.

Molly is fast. REALLY fast.