Rope Flow for Longevity | Practical

Rope flow. The underhand, bottom to the top. This is quite a simple thing. You can see even within this simple thing, we can start to have that right shoulder down.

Boom, boom.

We can march on the spot. You can have the other hand going in the opposite time. Train along.

Boom.

Right foot's down.

Right foot's down.

Right foot's down.

Right foot's down.

Focusing more on the spine again. It's gonna be a little bit like patting your tummy, rubbing your tummy, patting your head. That's what we want. That's how we're going to get brain development. So then we go to the other side.

Boom.

Everything's symmetrical.

Boom, boom, boom.

Left's going down. Right foot's going down. You bring more spine into it now.

Boom.

Only driving it from the spine.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

That's already been too much, or you're getting— feeling like it's overwhelming a little bit, reset. Reset your posture up tall like a dancer. Something that I've been working on a lot lately, I tend to have a hunched posture from my time playing a lot of hockey. You can go fully on the arm. So you see, FRC, there's these rotations. Cars, bullet, those two, right? You can do these kind of Circular movements, driving this thing only from the shoulder. Then we can drive it only from the wrist, and we can go the faster tempo.

Boom, boom, boom.

And we can bring the body back in. Okay, so now we go two hands.

2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

You can't get the feet yet.

4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

You can see we can just stand there and do it. That's fine. If you can integrate the body with it, you can treat it more like you're going to get a hip extension. It's going to be like a, like a swinging shot. It's not trying to be super specific for any sport, but it can be moved towards the movement of any sport. We can also move into a little bit more of a side stance. You see, we're doing nothing complex with the rope, but this is really where I think we should be starting with the rope.

Four, five.

For athletic longevity. Two, three, four, five.

One, two, three, 4, 5. 1, 2.

So this is front foot dominant. Imagine if you're doing this when you're 80. Imagine if I can get my father to do this, what's going to happen to his brain and body? At what age will my little boy, who's 9 months now, he can stand, can walk a bit, at what age is he going to be able to do this? The earlier he can do this, the more of a freak athlete he is. So if we take it to the extremes of a 100-year-old being able to do it, and the extreme of a, you know, say he's 2 years old, he's able to do it. If it's valuable at those extremes, if you'd be like, wow, at those extremes, then we want it now. We want it now. We want this dance ability now. If this is all easy for you so far, fantastic. If you've got a good big athletic background, this will probably be easy for you. This wasn't easy for me 6 months ago. As someone who hasn't done tons of sport in the last 20 years since I moved away from my goal of going to the Olympics as a hockey player, I haven't done a ton. I did swing a lot during those times. I was swinging the club, it's a bit like a golf club. I was also swinging on the back the backside to be able to shoot off the other side of the, the stick. And so I did have some swinging practice. I can chop trees down. I've chopped hundreds of trees down with an axe. The property that we had in Australia, I had to— I chose to not buy a chainsaw to begin with and chop down 100+ trees with my brother down on our property with axes. I just chopped some trees recently in France with the axe. So I had a bit more background. You might have a bit more background in rotational movement, you might not. Doesn't really matter. One side's likely to be more comfortable to rotate than the other. You can— it's going to be more comfortable to rotate off a certain stance. This is our normal kind of golf stance, right? If we're comfortable with this, this is one progression that we can get to from this underhand swing is to let it swing through a bit harder and then just stay there. If you've swung a golf club, you probably won't have too much difficulty. You can do it without the, without the changing stance. Starts to bring in a little bit more of the complexity. But even just staying with this underhand pattern, you can have a ton of fun. We can be on a, like, a fencing type of a buzz, getting in and out. We can be one hand, we can be two hands, other hand up. You've got this rhythm thing built into it, you've got this complexity thing built into it. As you get more skills with the rope, You can do more complex things with the rope at the same time. This is my more natural boxing stance. Think about being able to change the body positions. You got the rope there at the same time. You might be like, well, why wouldn't I just do this without the rope? Yeah, of course you could, and you should, and you would. But if you don't, then this is an invitation to do it again. This is an invitation to get yourself moving. The more complex footwork that you can engage with while doing this, the younger you are. So then we— you've seen I've been moving between two hands and one hand. One of the first moves that is often taught if you go the what's now become the established mainstream path of rope work, the main way to get started is to do one on Stay for 1, move for 1. Stay, move. Stay, move. Stay, move. Stay, move. What I mean by stay, move is I'm crossing the body, right? And we generally cross with this underhand. And all of these things are up for play. You can work on bringing the overhand and moving with the overhand to the other side. It's not as natural. But there's no one way of doing this. Backhanding, change the stance, go back to resetting the posture, staying tall. There's no one way with this. All we've done so far is play around with this underhand pattern. Some faster feet. This is a footwork pattern that you might see in speed ladders. You're getting a full body integration. When you get there, you execute. It's not really exact execution for any sport, but it's foundational execution. That if I played any racket sport, any type of racket, I'd be a little bit more prepared for it. You'll be a little bit more prepared for it. That's what we want here. It gets the heart rate up. This floor is a little bit slippery in my bare feet, so it's not— doesn't lend itself to maximal forwards or backwards. The underhand pattern is also great for uplifting the skips. Tim Sheath, who I've mentioned in the theory component there, big fan of skipping. I'm sure he's been doing it with the rope. It's probably in his course as well, to do it with the rope. Not sure, I haven't been through anyone's courses on ropes yet. I've watched a few videos on YouTube on how to get the dragon roll. And I wish there'd have been a more practical athletic approach to ropes, and so here it is. So here we are skipping, more lateral skips. You see, there's no limitations here. The only limitation is in our minds. Now this is the next progression, or a progression of the underhand. We can do it with— instead of the hands in front of the body, we can put the hands behind the body. So getting into and out of that is one of these tricks with the ropes. Now you generally won't do that on your first day. It took me about a week to understand it, but to be able to just put one hand behind We put one hand behind. So you see me here, I'm here, boom. I'm just going to put this left hand and take it around after it hits the bottom. It needs to get there by the time it hits the bottom. So boom, bottom, go, go, go. Okay, so then you're going to be stuck there. You're going to be like, go, go, go, go. So this is called the cheetah's tail. The first one we learned is called the matador. So this is the cheetah's tail. I've found it's generally quite an easy one for people to get started with. You don't have to move the feet out of the way, but this is what I'm talking about where we can get more athletic with things. So getting into the cheetah's tail, and when we get out, we're generally taking this— the right hand over the top So we're here and we're going to put the left hand behind, and then we take that right hand over the top to get out. So we're here, we're in the cheetah's tail. When it hits the ground and it comes to my right, I'm going to take that right hand over the top. So we're here, so we're here, and then on the beat, boom, boom, boom, then we're on the cheetah's tail. When it hits the ground, I'm going to take this right hand over the top.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

It took me about a week to learn this. If we're in person, I'll probably be able to get you this thing in 5 minutes, 10 minutes. I've started teaching people. You can also just start from this position, hand here and hand here. Start with by taking that right hand over the top. So if we imagine we were in the cheetah's tail Boom, boom, boom. We'll just pull this over and then we're back in business.

Boom, boom, boom.

Okay? But as I said before, don't— you don't have to get bogged down with this. If you're starting to do something and it's like losing its fun a little bit, go back to integrating the whole body. That's really what we want to do more so than anything else is integrate this, the whole body. So shoulders over.

Boom. Boom, boom, boom.

There's no, there's no real complexity in the execution of this. Working on getting that more full hip extension. We go slow, fast, slow, fast. That's how sport works. I hurt my ribs during the summer using a Viper, and I could feel it a little bit doing this. I used a lot of leverage in a rotational movement, top speed. I thought those Viper things were not that powerful, not that important, and then I used one. I mean, use aggressively to pop the rib. I use the heaviest one as aggressively as I could, as I tend to. So the lighter rope is just going to be more rewarding in terms of the— you get less whips, it causes less fatigue, but it gives a little bit less feedback as well. So I think this one is like the 8mm rope, it's from Way of the Rope from Tim Sheave, and then I've got the 12mm there as well. I've also got ropes from Winding Ropes in I've got some of these heavy ones, they're pretty cool as well. There's a heavier one somewhere here. So some more complexity if you want to go to an intermediate level of this underhand stuff, we've got this golfer's thing where we would do a bigger swing and then we can either— we generally just go to the other side after that. So after you come out— couldn't find my hat, hence the ear challenge. So yeah, we want to get those, those movements both sides, the golfer's swing. Change ears. That ear doesn't want to be reclamped. So, boom, we've got this swing, and then we can work on being able to not break the footwork. So these are some of our underhand movements. We've got underhand sneak on the right side, underhand sneak on the left side. We can always change the rotation slightly as well. If you turn it more to the front, so it's more of a sideways movement, and putting your feet in alignment with each other, there's even more space. You're not going to hit your foot. Initially you might hit your foot, you might hit your shoulder, it might get hooked up. It'll work itself out. Give yourself some time. But this is the unhand snake, working it forwards patterns. Backwards patterns. If you'd like, I'll do individual tutorials on each of these movements. Do everything that we've done so far, we could have done as a one-leg journey. It's encouraging you to get more creative, build a bigger base, be infinitely expansive This is our underhand. If we're thinking more about lateral movements, we start with this. It's called propeller. Propeller left hand, propeller right hand. Propeller is really— lends itself more to the one-arm movements as well. So we can one-arm into external rotation. Actually, so if this is, this would be the underhand. If we've got the overhand, and the overhand lends itself more to doing this internally rotated position as well. And when we do our overhand, it also lends itself to these big internal rotations of the shoulder. If we're going in with our sideways movements here, we've also got these passes behind. You get the pass behind at the bottom. These are some of our single arm sideways movements. So if you can get a feeling for this, if you're using the lighter rope on these, it's more forgiving if you're going to whack yourself a few times. We're going to change arms. We want to go with the overhand sideways pattern, so that means top to bottom, top to bottom in the front. So if we've got it here behind, boom, boom, boom, boom. So you can just work on one of them to begin with. If we're rotating through the hand, rotating, put it to the top, swap the hand. You can go propeller, propeller, propeller. And putting them back to back. So these are some of our sideways drills. And then the big one that a lot of people start with, which I wouldn't recommend starting with, but it's fun to learn as well, is the drag and roll. So with the drag and roll, you take the I think that— take the rope from the front left to the front right, and then the back left to the back right. So front left, front right, put it behind you. Back left, the back right, put it in front of you. So position 1, position 2, position 3, position 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2. You try to sweep it across in front of you, sweep it across the same way behind you. Oftentimes I'll have people practice just the movement from the wrist. Rope behind, rope in front. If you've done a lot of skipping, this will be really easy, but it's basically that same thing that we're going to do. Rope behind, rope in front. Rope behind, rope in front. I'm just putting these little turns in. So we just make it go sideways. So we're here again, flip to the back. When the rope's hitting the ground, that's when we turn. Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, back, right foot, back, left foot, back, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot.

Boom, boom.

It is easier to learn this with the rope as well. I learn it with a normal skipping rope. You don't get any feel for the movement, and it generally takes a lot longer. So if we've got left to right, and then we can go right to left, left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left. And at any stage, you can go back into propeller.

Whoa. Boom, front, front, front, back, front, front, front, back.

Just after it, when the rope's at the top, you swing it to the back. So this opens up more possibilities where you can go from the front movements, turn sideways into the Drag and roll, and then we can go into the matador, back into the drag and roll. You link these things together, but what I'm most interested in is, can you find these positions and you do the same thing while looking athletic? I think a lot of the criticism of the rope is that it doesn't really look athletic when you just rolling the rope around and you're static in the same position. But you can see if you are able to use more aggressive positions when you're pulled, then you are becoming athletic. So then the— some of the progressions on the drag and roll is to do more of a throw pattern. So I'm like left, right, left throw. And when it's at the back, so as soon as I go across the body, the side that it's going to— so it's starting left, going to the right— and I put that hand behind. If we can get those movements going on both sides of the body— so I'm naturally left-handed, this side's naturally more comfortable for me. I can tell you that my body is integrated a lot more. That's like a tennis serve. We can do it more like a throw. If you use a heavier rope, you're going to get a whole different stimulus. You see, you're getting to do the thing, which means you're going to have the power. I really like the drag and roll for these types of movements. So you see, I also do this. So I'm going right, left, right, left, left. But I can also go over. I can just go pretty much like a matador, but I'm doing it on a different orientation where I'm going across the body. I'm going across the body and then not doing the drag and roll, just sweeping it behind. And I often do them after. See, it's just one more rep, just goes behind the body rather than it being this drag and roll. This, this wasn't comfortable for me a little while ago. Now it is. Now I love it. We can always bring more footwork into it. This is like a skip. This is our backwards, our underhand, and sideways movements. We've also got the forwards movements to go as well. I don't do as many tricks on the forwards. I'm going to do that in a separate video. I hope this helps you to get started in rope in the most efficient, effective way. There's a swarm of bugs right there. I believe this is the most efficient, effective way for athletes to get started with rope. This will change your life. This will become addictive. When would you use it? Before weight training sessions, before field sessions, first thing in the morning, when you want to wind down. There's all different ways that you can use it. Obviously, you would go slower if you're winding down, just easy tempo. It will loosen up the thoracic spine, it will open up some options in the hips, but mostly it's going to integrate the body, it's going to get you dancing again. Dancing is joy, dancing is a blessing, dancing is the best all-round metric of how adaptable you're going to be to learning any new skill on the field. Stepping off the left, stepping off the right, all of those rhythms and movements, when you're Practicing footwork over and over again, and you can become more conscious of what you're showing the opposition, where your shoulders are, where your spine is, where your hips are. All of this awareness is going up and up and up like a dancer, like a gymnast, like a breakdancer, like a martial artist. So this is it. This is your opportunity to go to the next level as an athlete. I encourage you, get 40 hours of this, get 25 hours of this, and you will know exactly what I'm talking about. You do an hour a day for 25 days, you do 15 minutes a day for 4 months, you're gonna be in the game with this and you're gonna know. Once you know, you know. If you're already an amazing dancer, I still think you're gonna pick some stuff up with this. I still think you're gonna enjoy it. If like me, you had 2 left feet, you've lost all your athletic ability, you never really feel that smooth playing any kinds of sports, then this is just completely gonna change your life. Something that you can have with you for the rest of your life. Something that you can easily do with your partner, do with your children, do with your grandparents. It's a universal skill, just like what we do with the balls, just like what we do with the balance. We're looking for these universal things that we can take to anybody. But yeah, I would also love to get your feedback on this so far, what you're picking up from it. I'm going to lay out also some, some routines and things here, but Once you've got these frameworks in your mind, like the throw framework, where you can know, okay, I can change the tempo, okay, I can change the height, okay, I can change the rotation and rhythm. Once you have all this in your mind, working on the footwork, then you will be able to easily implement that and just flow naturally, which is also another big gift of this, the ability to improvise, the ability to flow freely, the need, the lack of need to have a coach. The ability to go and do this with a friend and copy each other, follow each other. There's so much here, there's so much beautiful stuff here. I wish I would have taken on earlier. I appreciate those who took it on earlier than me and persisted with it. But now it's, uh, it's time to take it to the whole strength and athletic community. It's time to take it to aged care. It's time to take it into kindergartens. And this is a transformation that needs to happen. So if you would like to go further with your ropes education, there's an opportunity on also to do that. Just express your interest and, uh, we can take this further. Appreciate you being here. I appreciate you doing this work. Be posting your videos. Make those 1-minute clips every month showing that your, your progression as an athlete. Maybe put 15 seconds of it dedicated to the rope. And yeah, you're going to see that your body lights up in a way that, uh, it never has before. Appreciate you. Let's get going on the rope.