#trickroper

This update is delayed but I took a trip in June to England, Ireland, and France. This was just for vacation and sightseeing for 15 days but I did bring a rope of course! Here are some photo highlights of roping in Europe, sorry but most of my pictures are from London. I didn’t manage to catch any roping shots in Paris, I was too busy enjoying the city. The weather was wonderful when I was there but since then they’ve had two very harsh heat waves. Glad I missed that but at the same time we’ve gotten to 116 F here at home.

London, by Trafalgar Square:

London Parliament:

By Tower Bridge

London, Russel Square:

Ireland, Cliffs of Moher

Joan of Arc in Paris:

After hurting my knees through overwork last month I was lying low for a few weeks letting them heal, the left one was particularly worrisome but they started feeling better and I’m back to doing some moderate jumping and hopping. Hopping high in the air with both feet simultaneously gives the most strain so I am limiting that kind of jump and trying to do more leaping from one foot to another only as high as I need to. I love jumping in, out and through ropes so it takes self control to hold back. Once I start I tend to want to run it just about until I drop so I have to pull back. A natural limiter has been the weather this week, we had a day at 95 deg F. So that slows me down a bit. 

I had been taking lunch breaks at the park once or twice a week pretty regularly since December to get rope training in but I’ll cut that back considerably now with the warm weather. To cap it off I edited together some clips of me at the park over the last months into a five minute video. This documents the main tricks I’ve been working up in that time. A lot of bounces and jump throughs.

Video: Roping at the Park - Gill T.

From the video you can get a sense of how mild the winters are here in Arizona. We have some cold mornings but nothing that would do you any harm. There was a big snowstorm in the high country that gave us some nice diversity, snow was even seen around many parts of Tucson, but at my house we didn’t see any of that. I got to rope in the Tucson Rodeo Parade on Feb 21st. What a great opportunity, if you get to rope in a parade then I highly suggest it, it’s a fun challenge. The snow actually came in the day after the parade so it was perfecto! The Daily Star caught a great shot of me, second photo in their photo album.

I used a 17.5 foot rope with a metal thimble, which is basically asking for a challenge because it’s a heavier rope and needs to be spun on the quick side to maintain flat loops. The parade route was 2 miles long and I’m trailing the Tucson Boys Chorus wagon the whole way trying to pull off tricks and keep up at the same time. You can see why I call it a fun challenge. There was wind too which definitely makes a difference on the rope. First thing in the morning my hands were cold, but once I started spinning that rope I warmed right up. I took a few days to recover after that.

Photo: Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus Wagon that I followed

I have been working on fixing my bad form on the jump through, a trick similar to the classic skipping through a vertical loop except this one is done with a smaller loop size and can be mixed in to a butterfly routine. I wrote about it earlier as I was preparing to learn the “Texas” Skip and I noted my tendency to lift the loop up so that I went headfirst through instead of the loop passing directly horizontally around the body. Well, I have corrected my form on that and in doing so I have totally overworked myself and caused injury, hopefully not permanent but I’m not sure yet. 

Photo: Gill T. doing a jump through and wrecking his knees 19 Mar 2019

I came out of a week recently where I had trained too hard on other jumping tricks, spoke hops specifically. So my knees were already partially strained, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. After taking some down time I felt ready for another workout, I was loving the feeling of doing the jump through so on Tuesday I took one of my regular lunchtime getaways to the park near the office and roped for a good hour. I started out on many other tricks but the last half of the workout was all about jump through. I was practicing them repeatedly, working towards the point where it’s solid and I would hardly miss, that’s the goal, performance ready.

It was feeling so good I didn’t want to stop, but the time was requiring me to return to the office. After finishing some work that afternoon I picked up my rope and ran the jump through for another 20 minutes, still feeling pretty good, tired, but good. After dinner I started to feel it, my knees were aching and cracking and popping every time I bent them. It wasn’t a muscle ache but in the joint and the swelling began. These warnings came far too late and as I went to bed that night I knew I wouldn’t be doing that or any other jumping trick any time soon. It’s a very depressing feeling.

I lay there pleading with my maker to give me a healing miracle so that I could once again do these tricks, I was just at the point where I felt ready to show my skills to the world! I found my limit by pushing it and exceeding it in a destructive way, and I hope that now that I know this information I can use it to know how hard I can train before taking a break next time. But if I don’t recover to the point where I am able to do these tricks again then I learned a lesson that I cannot directly apply, which would be just a really terrible thing. I might be over-reacting, I really hope that’s what’s going on here and after a few weeks I’ll be well enough to start working these tricks back in, but at a much more reserved pace. I resolved to wait at least a week before doing any sort of jumping trick and that if I do recover enough to do these tricks again, I will practice it a little here and a little there, never again replicating such an intensive training schedule.

I am 41 years old, and although I usually feel rather fit, I am feeling the unavoidable physical degradation that comes with age. It’s suddenly hitting me hard. I thought that staying vigorously active would be a great thing for my body, but the yellow light didn’t come on soon enough, or I was so wrapped up in the joy of jumping through a spinning loop that I didn’t notice it. I have had some joint issues in the past, and I’ve been aware that it’s a weak spot for me. My first knee issues started around age 13 when I was skateboarding in the emptied out swimming pool in our backyard. I heard a pop followed by acute knee pain, I rested and recuperated for a while and then talked to a doctor about it who said it was probably Osgood Schlatter, an issue common in teenage years. Eventually both knees were similarly afflicted and I was told I would grow out of it, which indeed seemed to happen. I don’t know if that has any connection to my current state but over the years I have had other wrist and ankle issues in addition to frequent popping and crackling noises coming from my knees. It’s never put me down like this though.

Alright, I am being a baby about it, I can still walk right now. I’m avoiding stairs if possible and bending especially my left knee. My left ankle was aching too but not as much. I iced it a few times, last night it was feeling a little better but was still noticeably swollen and I feel like I’m a far ways off from being able to safely jump up and down. It’s just a quite different experience than how I felt 3 days ago, shocking that it can turn around like this without even a specific point in time during training where I felt like I was injured or getting injured. Age is a stealthy killer.

Usually one of the most dramatic moments in a trick roping performance is when the roper spins a large vertical loop and then skips through it as it swings back and forth on either side of the roper. We call it the Texas Skip, and it has a ring to it, but I don’t have any proof that the trick has any strong connection to the grand state of Texas and I haven’t even heard of any anecdotal rumor that would link the two together. I have a theory about why we call it the Texas Skip, which is that someone started calling it the “Texas” skip only for a flashy title and to evoke the classic Western imagery that comes along with a word like Texas. At the risk of hurting one’s Texas pride, I venture to say that Texas doesn’t have a claim on this trick’s origination and I will lay out my thought process and the supporting evidence that brought me to this conclusion. Along the way I hope you find this history to be as fascinating as I do.

I have become somewhat obsessed with all things to do with roping so digging into the history of it going back more than a century has been inspiring and eye opening. I feel like I have just scratched the surface though, as there is probably much detail hiding in hard to find places or even lost with those who have passed on. There very well may not be a lot of official documentation on the subject, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no definitive answer to be had on the origin of the phrase “Texas Skip”. Learning Spanish would probably be a great help to really get into roping history because I’m sure there are insights from the charro and vaquero perspective that can’t be found from the cowboys and in English records.

Google’s ngram viewer, a tool to search the usage of words and phrases from a large library of cataloged written books and media, comes up completely empty for the phrase Texas Skip. I was surprised to see that so I had to proceed with other means of research and I found some fascinating facts along the way, many of which I’ll save for another day but in regards to Texas Skip, or Skipping through a vertical loop, here’s what I know:

The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame website states that champion roper and rider Flores LaDue was reputed to be the first person to have done the Texas Skip, although it refers to it as “the trick known as the Texas Skip”. That they refer to it somewhat indirectly like that makes sense to me because at the time of its origination and for some years after I have found that ropers did not use the phrase “Texas Skip”, but would call it by more of a descriptive name like skipping through a vertical loop. Many rope tricks are called different things by different people as I’m finding out, or just have no name at all. It might be true that LaDue was the first to do this trick, but I don’t believe she, or any of her contemporaries called it as we call it today.

Flores LaDue born in 1883 was from Minnesota, at a rather young age she ran off to perform with various western shows, met fellow performer Guy Weadick and they got married. They did some traveling in the US, Canada, and around Europe. Back in the states she had a short stint with a show Will Rogers was running in late 1910 to early 1911 but soon after settled in Canada and started up the Calgary Stampede. No account that I found mentions any association with the state of Texas, she has no personal connection to the state and there is no reason it would be called “Texas” skip on her account.

James F. Taylor  of The Pittsburgh Press Oct 1, 1916 describes LaDue doing a trick which sounds exactly like the one in question, which shows us that it was indeed a trick that she could do and included in her performances: “With the end of the rope in her right hand she jumps through the revolving loop from one side to the other. And all the time twenty or thirty or forty feet of rope is whirling around so rapidly, in a great circle, that one cannot see the loop.”

In the 2011 book “The First Stampede of Flores LaDue” Wendy Bryden, author, says that Flores was the first woman to do the trick known as the Texas Skip, which is a little bit different of a statement than that made by the National Cowgirl Museum which was that she was the first person to do the trick. In any case, I don’t doubt that she was very influential and has a strong association with the trick. Most tricks don’t have traceable attribution anyway since they are usually passed around in such a non-formal way, but a rough idea of the time and place of origination can sometimes be deciphered. 

The first video I know of the trick is from 1918 made by Ford motor company which shows Will Rogers doing rope tricks for a few minutes, some nice 2 rope tricks and the skip. We also have video of Will Rogers in his 1922 film “The Ropin’ Fool” doing this and many other tricks and catches. Video recording was not common at that time so I don’t expect to find much of it, but with photographs and written accounts we can still decipher a lot. Will Rogers, Oklahoma’s favorite son, was such a popular figure that there is a lot written about him and I haven’t reviewed nearly half of it but so far I haven’t come across mention that he did the skip in his earlier Vaudeville days in the first decade of the century.

There is photographic evidence seen above in a 1913 product brochure from Plymouth Rope of 2 ropers apparently skipping through vertical loops at Miller Brothers and Arlington 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. These ropers are Hank Durnell and Chester Byers, Durnell was from Indiana and Byers was born in Illinois but moved to Oklahoma as a young child and there was inspired to become a trick roper and cowboy; at age eight he ran into Will Rogers and fell in love with roping and cowboy culture. Byers wrote a book called “Roping” published in 1928 where he calls the trick simply “Skipping - through a vertical loop”. Speaking of Oklahoma ropers who were inspired by Will Rogers, Sam Garrett, a friend of Byers’ was a very famous roper who has been photographed doing the trick. It is recounted that Will Rogers at least had some part in passing on some tricks to both Garrett and Byers. Another 1913 photo exists of cowgirl turned movie actress Jane Bernoudy doing a trick captioned “Jumping through a vertical loop” at the Pendleton Round Up seen below and published in “The World’s Work, A History of Our Time Vol 27″ in a sub-article called “Let ‘er Buck”.

It’s clear that by 1913 the trick was well known among top ropers performing the circuit, none of which were from Texas that I can tell (many of which were from Oklahoma though). Furthermore, none of them seem to be calling the trick the Texas Skip. But a snappy name means a lot, and at some point somebody called it that and boy did it stick! I am a little put off by it as it is historically misleading, but I admit that it’s an easy name and I probably don’t have the influence to change it at this point so I’ll live with it, but I will also use it cautiously and perhaps only when necessary.

A favorite trick of ropers is the butterfly, La Mariposa. Named thus because the shape the loop marks out as it traverses it's cyclical pattern resembles left and right wings of a butterfly (in another world it could be called the Tie-Fighter). The challenge it presents comes with rewards in the form of a trick that is beautiful and satisfying to execute. It lends itself to variation and layering more tricks on top of the base butterfly pattern, so it is a standard part of a comprehensive trick roping routine. Limited to a smaller loop size, the trick gets it's appeal from the dynamic multi-dimensional movement of the loop and by the quick subtle movements of the arm and wrist needed to maintain it. Although never entering the category of big loop tricks, the trick can still be manipulated on a range from small to tiny loop, where the skill and speed needed is inversely proportional to the size of the loop - a point not always recognized by the general audience.

The trick consists of a vertical loop and is moved back and forth to the left and right side of the roper in a pattern that can be repeated continually. The vertical spin is in the forward direction, it spins like a wheel that would roll forward. A full cycle of the trick takes 4 revolutions of the loop, with 2 on each side. In the second half of the spin on each side you pull the rope over to the other side and the loop passes in front of the roper. The Reverse Butterfly can also be done by spinning the loop in the opposite direction, this will become handy when doing tricks like the Arrowhead and others where the pattern is taken around the body or the roper does a 180 degree turn. If you are familiar with Texas Skip then the cycle of the butterfly will be very familiar, the difference is in the size of the loop and that the loop passes in front of the roper instead of the roper jumping through the middle.

I am familiar with cotton ropes, so that is the perspective I give here. There are other varieties of stiffer ropes that you can use for this and many other tricks, but I don’t know enough about those yet to make any useful comments. I do know the feel of some ropes can be quite different, but some of the same principles will still apply. The rope I learned on and that I use in the video is a 12 foot limp cotton rope with 2 pennies added to the honda for weight. You can do this trick without the extra weight, or with a little more weight but don’t go too heavy or you’ll throw your shoulder out trying to spin fast enough to keep the loop open. Use a rope that is 9 feet or more for a comfortable butterfly. I start with about 9 or 10 feet of rope to make the loop and spoke combined, with the spoke initially being 1 to 1.5 feet and that leaves a loop that can be around 3 feet in diameter. When you first start spinning the loop will often decrease a little so don’t start too small.

You can start on either the right or left side, I switch between both ways and although most references will recommend starting on the left side for right handers, I find starting on the right side comfortable. On the right side you find yourself in a natural position but on the left you cross your right hand over your left so you can throw the initial spin forward, it gives some good momentum out of the gate. Either way, once you are in the trick it’s all the same because it just keeps alternating sides. And there is no difference in the pattern for right handed or left handed butterfly, you can pass off between hands without interruption to the pattern once you have developed the skill in both hands.

For the sake of balance, I suggest you learn right and left handed butterfly at the same time instead of learning first with your dominant hand then starting the process again with your non-dominant hand. I give you three reasons why:

1. Practicing repeatedly with the same arm only, gives you an uneven workout.

2. You can practice longer without fatigue when you alternate arms.

3. Once you have it down with your dominant hand, it feels frustrating to go back to ground zero when you start with your non-dominant hand. It’s better to work them up simultaneously so one doesn’t get jealous of the other.

When I started learning this trick, just last summer, I could hardly get started and the loop would close up and even at best I had a distorted and flailing pattern. It was very hard to control. I worked on it for a while and made some progress, but it was still not smooth and I could not run it for very long. I decided to try it with a tighter eye of the honda, so I pinched down the honda and put a piece of tape there to keep it tighter around the rope and not let it slip as freely. This does make it easier to spin the butterfly but the feel is different and you don’t have the control over the loop size to make it bigger or smaller intentionally. I had difficulty controlling the loop size anyway so this was actually a temporary help for me. A big problem I had was the loop would sometimes get too big and the spoke too small and I would compensate by spinning my arm in a bigger circle, on the other hand I had times when the loop would rapidly close up and I would lose it completely. Not having to worry about that made it easier to focus on the coarse motions needed to run the pattern. I kept it for a few days before I took the tape off and was ready to learn it properly. It just takes time to get total control over the loop, I still have a ways to go on that journey, but it has gotten a lot better. I made a lot of mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake too many times, at least make different mistakes, then you find that some of those mistakes aren’t mistakes at all, but you can learn something from them about how a certain motion of the hand influences the rope. 

I learned that for a smooth flow, you don’t apply equal force as you spin around all 360 degrees, it can be good to do a swift flick to get the honda over the top of the loop and then back off while the momentum carries it around again. I learned that keeping the loop close to the arm instead of letting it fling out to the far left and right side makes it easier to build up a bigger loop, and conversely I learned that a more elaborate left and right swing movement can help decrease the loop size, or keep it from growing. There are other ways to control the speed, size, and position of the rope but these are just the first helpful things I’ve noticed.

This is a travel log detailing my journey of learning Texas Skip. I'm not calling it a tutorial because for one, that would imply a level of proficiency on my part that I don't think I have yet, but if you're a beginner at the skip you can use it as a tutorial for lack of a personal coach. I will walk you through my methods which I believe have been effective. If you're experienced at skip then maybe you just love roping so much that you want to read about it anyway; I will do my best to make it interesting by mixing in some personal antics because at heart I'm an entertainer after all. There is a companion video to go with this post, embedded below (while you’re there like, follow, subscribe etc.).

I have been roping a lot lately, nearly every day in the last three months and at least regularly for the last six months. I started this kick when I took a summer vacation to San Diego and brought with me a rope and juggling balls. I got a nasty sunburn spending a day at the beach juggling and roping, it was well worth it. I'm full on obsessed with roping at this point and don't plan on stopping. I went from thinking more about juggling to almost completely consumed with roping at the expense of my juggling progression, although I have a goal to get a solid 5 club juggle down this year so I'll be coming back around to that.

I thought I was a decent roper previously, but now I see I've made more progress in the last six months than at any other period and I have a lot of room to go, so by comparison I wasn't anything special, just someone who knew a few tricks but would go years at a time without touching a rope. I've repented of all that now and I keep a rope by my bedside at all times, a fact to which my wife can attest, or detest as it may be.

I knew I would need to learn the butterfly and the skip if I were to take myself as a serious roper, and I didn't have the right rope for skip so I started with butterfly. It's much easier to find room indoors to practice that one anyway. The struggles of learning the butterfly kept me busy for a while but as I had success there I knew it was time to take the plunge into Texas Skip. It's scary because it's bigger, but that's no reason to run away from it. I can just move some furniture out of the way.

After ordering 100 feet of rope, I turned my mind to procuring a brass honda, which I have heard about so often in relation to the skip. Before I followed through with that, I got curious about an 18 foot rope I bought a while back but never used very much (It was actually a little less than 18 feet, but I'm not counting). I picked up a metal rope thimble at the hardware store on my way home from work one day and then all the fun began. I'm assuming this thimble is not as heavy as most brass hondas, I haven't measured it though.

My previous entry discusses how I eased into this longer and heavier rope. I won't recount all that here, just what's directly relevant to skip. I can sum most of that up by saying that a heavy honda took some getting used to, and although at first I was a little confused and distracted with a jump through trick I had already learned, I soon decided to put that out of my head, back up, and just learn the standard skip as explained in the reference material I have been reading.

So now you know the reason I'm using such a short rope, because I procrastinated ordering the honda and was too lazy to put together a longer rope. I do wonder if the shorter rope means that the spinning cycles are faster though; with many other tricks I find I need to spin faster when I use a smaller loop and can slow it down with a bigger loop. When I say slow I mean the RPMs, not the actual speed of the honda. At a fixed RPM, a bigger loop requires the honda to actually move faster around the circular path of travel than it would with a smaller loop. That's a tangent though, more experimentation needed on this later.

When I had thrown that rope around enough, I felt ready to get down to work at learning this trick in earnest. It's a cyclical trick, consisting of a repeating sequence not unlike the butterfly. As with all rope tricks, speed and timing are critical, the other critical element is smoothing out the trajectory of motion. What is different about this trick compared to most other tricks is the size and the intensity. Those are the same factors that cause it to be such a crowd pleaser too. It feels like you are cranking a big propeller back and forth as you jump up and down without even a second to rest. There is a great aerobic benefit to this, I'm not so young anymore myself so If I can pull this off I'll consider myself fortunate enough to have a second childhood. Naturally, the novice must exert extra effort but as the technique is refined, some unnecessary work is eliminated leaving only an elegant efficiency. I'm not at that point yet needless to say.

Since the full trick is a complicated sequence of moves, I broke it down into individual elements that I could practice separately and later put back together. Some of what I discuss is demonstrated in this video, but you could get some additional insight from reading through, so don’t stop here.

Now I will explain right handed texas skip, standard direction spin (as if you set the loop down and it would roll backwards) here's the full Gill T. Rundown:

Spin a vertical loop clockwise on the right side. I don't start with the full length of loop out, I build up to it in the first 5 turns or so. Two challenges are starting the loop and keeping it steady. Once it's started, I had an easier time building it up than keeping it steady after it was full size.

With a continuous loop, the next step is to understand the rhythm to know when to skip through. As you swing the spoke down, get ready to jump. When you pull up, also pull to the left as you jump and the loop will ideally pass around you. You should be in the air as the spoke rises up and over by your left shoulder. I got tangled in the rope at this point a number of times, but eventually I cleared it; the loop didn't continue spinning on the other side but just making it through was a win.

Check now to make sure you can turn a steady loop on your left side with your right arm crossed over to the left, counter clockwise spin. This is what you will need to do as soon as you clear your first skip.

A big milestone is being able to start your loop on the right, skip through when ready, then continue the loop steady on the left. Indeed this is a trick in and of itself. Congratulate yourself and celebrate your achievement when you get here, you’re not far off from a continuous skip.

Being able to skip through from left to right is now what you need to add, it can be approached in the same stepwise fashion as you learned the right to left skip, just be aware that your body might not have perfect symmetry in ability. You may find certain aspects harder or easier on the other side.

At this point you should focus on spinning multiple spins on the side, skipping through, spinning more on the other side and then skipping back when ready. This can be repeated as long as desired or till you run out of steam. You can imagine now that if you eliminate the extra spins between skips, then you are running the classic Texas Skip!

The full cycle of the trick consists of 4 complete rotations of the rope. I think of the rhythm as 1 & 2 skip 3 & 4 skip repeated over and over, with the numbers counted when the spoke is going downward and the &s and skips when the spoke is going upward. 1 and 2 are on the right side and 3 and 4 are on the left. I highly recommend going through the motions without the rope, you could even start with your arm only and then add the jump when you are ready. A big advantage to this is that you can slow it down as much as you need. When you pick up the rope physics will force a minimum speed on you, for me and my current rope I clock in at 126 RPM, I know because I measured it while watching a video playback. You can get a free metronome app so go ahead and practice the motions to a steady click (full disclosure, I didn’t practice with a metronome, but it’s not a bad idea). You could start around 90 - 100 BPM (beats per minute) and work up. Your friends won’t be impressed that you can swing your arm and hop around so you’ll have to eventually pick your rope back up and do it with the rope. You will get tired and tangled, the rope will slap your face, back, legs etc. but over the course of a few dedicated practice sessions you should start to see some improvement. I had spun ropes a lot before trying this trick so it might have come faster to me than average, but after a few weeks I was doing something resembling the Texas Skip.

A weighted honda was an unfamiliar thing to me until recently. I taped a few pennies on one of my smaller ropes months ago and didn't notice a big difference right away, later as I switched between ropes I could tell a subtle difference, and I started liking a little extra weight. A few pennies is small change though when it comes to honda weight, that would only be applicable to smaller ropes to do flat loop and butterfly tricks. Those aren't heavy ropes, just light ropes that have been "balanced" to taste. There is another breed of rope that has a different purpose and feel; heavy ropes that are good for large vertical loops and large wedding ring tricks, but the number one attraction seems to be the Texas Skip. I've seen a few Texas Skip videos and read a few brief tutorials but I haven't seen a lot of detailed accounts on the subject of transitioning from light ropes to heavy ropes so I hope to share something meaningful from my experience. I'm not intending to move away from light ropes of course, I love those ropes. I'm just expanding my repertoire. 

The video below demonstrates most of what is discussed in this entry.

Video: Adventures In Trick Roping - Long and Heavy Ropes

I have a 25 foot length for a long skip rope but I haven't put a brass honda in it yet, I'm experimenting with just tying a big fat honda on it which upon first test does well for large wedding rings but I don't think the weight of the knot is quite enough for the large vertical loop needed for skip, I'll probably transition to the traditional brass honda soon. 

Photo: A simple but effective tied honda.

Before going to a 20+ foot rope, I dive in with my 18 foot rope that used to seem too long and floppy so I hardly used it, that's before I added weight to it though. A month ago I put in a metal thimble and now it's a different beast. I just picked up an off the shelf 3/8 in rope thimble from the hardware store and taped it in snug to try it out, figuring that if I liked it I could sew it in later. I’m pretty sure at this point that I will sew it in permanently.

Photo: Honda weighted by a metal rope/cable thimble.

The first thing I noticed when spinning this rope is that I really had to crank it to get a good loop to open. I can do a horizontal loop with a moderate to large loop diameter. Sustaining a small loop with a heavy honda does not seem to work for me, I didn't expect it to work but just wanted to try it out. The weight has a tendency to close the loop on you quickly, especially when your loop size is smaller. It's clearly more of a workout with your arm and shoulder to spin these loops, you will feel it. Even with the weight, a loop will still open up bigger when you accelerate enough so you can start at a medium size and work up to a big loop. Be careful though, you can still get to a point where the loop will ride up your spoke and if you've got no more rope to let out the loop will lose its circular shape and at that point and start flopping around which could get dangerous. There's more rope and more weight, in addition to sometimes faster speeds so it packs more of a wallop when you smack yourself with it. I've gotten hit in the face and other sensitive ares when working with light ropes, and I really want to avoid that with a weighted honda. That aspect brings a new fear, and fear is prohibitive to development. We should keep ourselves safe, but also take appropriate risks. Tread slowly enough at first to build some confidence, then ramp it up to try new things and open yourself to improvement. It didn't take too long to get used to it, I haven't smacked myself yet but I'm sure it's inevitable. I’m happy to risk it, they used to call me Danger Boy after all.

It can get uncomfortable to spin a large flat loop, heavy or not, the positioning of a vertical loop is probably easier on your posture because you don't have to worry about keeping the loop away from your shins but the spinning feel is different for a vertical loop as gravity is working with the honda half the cycle and against the honda the other half instead of equally all the way around like with horizontal loops. I started with a medium size flat loop and tilted it up into a horizontal loop to get the vertical loop feel. Then I tried starting right into a horizontal loop. The start takes some getting used to, there's no quick secret trick to it that I can share, you just have to start cranking. I did have some starts where the rope got all tangled up in my arms right away, I think it might be a question of how fast and how big of a circle you swing your arm from the start, but I don't know exactly. From the start I experimented with spinning direction, a few items of clarification are in order on the subject of spinning direction. Standard "forward" butterfly uses a counter clockwise loop when it's on your right side but will then be a clockwise loop when it's on your left side. Of course the loop doesn't change spinning direction, it's just that your perspective changes as it passes from one side to the other, just like someone on one side of a door says the knob is on the left while someone on the other side of the door says the knob is on the right. The standard Texas Skip loop however uses a clockwise loop when it's on your right side but it becomes a counter clockwise loop on your left side so it's more akin to a reverse butterfly in the direction of spin. That's the convention, it's supposed to be a little easier that way but I can't say from any experience yet. I know that when I try reverse butterfly it feels strange and hard to spin it that direction, but maybe just because it's different than what I'm used to.

One of the first things I wanted to do after getting a little feel for a stationary vertical loop was transitioning from a vertical loop into a wedding ring. This one is not a lift-on but a gradual tilt of the rope till it's in the horizontal position. I thought it shouldn't be too difficult of a trick, and I was mostly right but I'm not quite solid on it every time. I had a few wobbles and instances of getting tangled up in it but in a short time I had success too. My main focus was in smoothing out the loop as it transitions. I started the vertical spin in a clockwise direction with my right hand, built up the loop a little and then started tilting. It wasn't so steady for me in the in the transition and I think that the speed of your spin is very critical. When it goes horizontal it feels like you can ease up a bit compared to what you need to keep the vertical loop going. It's just a new, unfamiliar feel but I'm getting used to it. You can start your vertical spin in the other direction (counter clock wise) but mind you, when it falls to a horizontal loop it will then be going in the opposite direction from what most people are used to for wedding ring. While in training, you may quickly feel the muscles straining in your shoulder and want to alternate between left and right arms to balance it all out, that's what I did and my left arm was actually pretty good out of the gate.

The next little step was going from flat loop, to vertical loop, to wedding ring. Which is really just putting two things together that I already did so I found it not really any more difficult. It's interesting to consider that this works with a heavy honda, but now if you pick up a light rope and try this you will likely get it into a vertical loop for a few seconds and then it goes all wet noodle. Now I see why we have weighted hondas. So I then started thinking about doing the trick in reverse order? From wedding ring tilting into a vertical loop, I tried it a few times (with a heavy rope of course) and it didn't feel easy but I got it to work once. I haven’t tried it since because I don’t want to tarnish my record. ;)

I then decided to try some horizontal loop tricks with a heavy rope. Flat loop, step in, wedding ring, handshakes, spoke hops, lift-off, and even lift-on were all do-able while keeping the loop size in check. Some of those tricks felt quite different with a large heavy rope but I want to keep working them so I have the option to make a continuous routine going back and forth between horizontal tricks and vertical skip tricks.

Here is an interesting question: can you do the butterfly with the heavy rope? and my answer is for practical purposes no. To keep the movement of the rope manageable in front of you it's best to not have too big a loop for butterfly but these heavy ropes work best with bigger loops it seems, so that's against you, the loop closes up and you end up fighting it pretty hard to try to keep it open. Try it if you want a difficult physically intensive challenge, let me know if you have success. Now a medium weight rope would probably be a yes for butterfly but I’d steer clear of it with heavy ropes.

I turn now to Texas Skip from my beginner's perspective. I've heard it's not quite as hard as the butterfly, and I can do at least a passable butterfly at this point so I have some confidence going into this but I've got to tell you, once I see that big spinning loop next to me, skipping through it does not come too natural. But one nice thing about these ropes is that if you spin the right speed and motion, you can spin a stationary vertical loop for as long as your arm holds out and you can stare at that spinning spoke for as long as you like while contemplating jumping through. The loop will hold there till you're ready to jump through, compare this to learning butterfly and you've got to keep that loop moving left to right and back, you can't easily stop and hold the loop on one side till you're ready to bring it back to the other side again. Maybe you're better at coaxing your butterfly to stay put but mine loses shape if I try to hold it on one side for more than a few spins. For me, it feels easier to jump through when I'm turning the rope in the opposite direction from the standard skip. A counter clockwise loop on my right side seems easier to jump through from a timing perspective than a clockwise loop. I haven't really tried very much yet but I'm just backwards I guess.

My skip was not immediately feeling smooth. I did make it through the loop sometimes as you can see in the video, and I don't always lose the loop after I go through it but I can't keep skipping through multipe times and what I've got isn't pretty, it's a struggle. This first rope I'm trying is smaller than standard which probably causes some issues, but I'm sure that's not the source of all my issues. I've only spent a few sessions trying this trick out, so right now I just need to spend more time with it, review some video of my flaws and work to correct them one at a time.

Photo: Jump Through Sequence with 15 ft. rope.

I think that the reason why I feel more comfortable spinning the rope in the "other" direction for skip is because that's how I did the jump-through trick from my younger days (see the first blog entry: Choir Boy Beginnings) and it's hard for me now to approach this trick as something different, but I feel it should be considered as such. The Texas Skip as I see it performed by others looks very different to me than my old jump through trick and not just because of the differences in the rope used. During skip the rope stays very vertical, it should anyway, straight up and down; and the body should stay facing forward, just moving the arm to the right and left to keep the loop going on either side of you. The rope should also be at the same height on both sides, not going up and down at all. I have really bad technique in all those areas, I'm afraid I learned bad habits young but I'm sure I can break it. The jump through I did was probably borne out of copying and approximating the actual Texas Skip, I learned the jump through from other chorus boys at a time when I hadn't ever seen the actual Texas Skip but I think someone saw it and figured a way to do something similar with a shorter rope and then passed it on to me. So now looking at my jump through shortcomings with a critical eye: I tilt the rope so it's not quite vertical, it tends to be lower when on my right side, my head leans in and goes through the loop first, and I face my body more to the left side. Wow, I have a lot of work to do to clean this up, but at least I now have a rope more suited for the job.