Nate K-G: Celina, do you have another note on coaching that you want to add in?
Celina Furman: Yes.
Nate K-G: Let’s do it.
Celina Furman: Okay. It’s very quick. I have two, actually that I think one I want to talk about more than the other, so I can say both of them or I can just talk about the other, the more pressing one.
Nate K-G: Just run straight into it.
Celina Furman: Okay. The first is that you can learn from more than one person…
Nate K-G: Oh my gosh, thank you!
Celina Furman: With anything in life! You can learn from more than one person.
Nate K-G: And you don’t need blind loyalty to the one person who has helped you a little bit. You can appreciate everyone at every point in your journey. Thank you, Celina!
Celina Furman: Yes! And those people, you will have specific people that maybe have more meaning to you than others. So I had dozens of coaches growing up and I have a key few that were like my role models that I wanted to be, but I learned different things from each of them and I think the same applies to online learning is you have so many resources. Different people have different teaching styles, they have different skill levels, they have different styles and you get the benefit of picking and choosing what you want to learn from each of these people.
You might vibe with them differently. You might learn from certain styles better, and you might favor different coaches depending on where you are in your jump rope journey. So maybe someone really inspired the start of your journey. And then as you get more advanced, you find a new favorite person to teach you these more advanced skills.
And that is okay! And it is okay to share people that teach you with others. And hopefully when you start teaching, this is the general you of whoever is listening to the podcast… when you start sharing your skills with people that wanna learn, when they say, “Hey, where’d you learn that? How do you do that?” That you’ll become that person to them, which is super cool. That’s my first thing.
Nate K-G: Okay, thing number two?
Celina Furman: Okay, thing number two. I want to mention that COVID introduced a new way of teaching and learning that is new to jump rope. It is new to everything else in the world. The way that we’re doing school, the way people are exercising prior to lockdowns jump rope was always taught in person, from YouTube, you’re special, but it was taught at camps. It was taught at workshops, it was taught in afterschool programs, and it was taught at team practices. And this kept jump rope very insular and underground because you could only learn it if you were with someone that could teach it to you.
But COVID increased the accessibility of jump rope because we were forced to bring it online. We were forced to do Zoom classes and then these online tutorials were birthed. And so I just want to make note that it’s still an evolving thing, that we are still learning how to teach online. And online learning is very different from in person learning. So if you’re teaching someone how to jump in person, you are able to touch them, and correct them, and move them into their correct position. But you can’t do that online, you have to explain it to them. You have to imagine how they’re feeling. Sometimes you have to turn and face away from the camera.
So it’s a learning curve and I just wanna bring it full circle back to like my tears of coaches that like I was thinking of the beginning, that there’s like these super experiences, people there’s people that I’ve learned from these super experiences. There’s people that are just sharing their tips and tricks of what have worked for them. And I want to give value to those people, the ones that are just sharing the tips and tricks, because those people are the ones that have learned jump rope online. They did not learn in person like I did and so they might have unique ways that they’re thinking about these skills that helps them learn online, that they might be able to share with someone else that I would never think of because I… someone just moved my arm into the right position.
I never had to think about where it was going until I started teaching it, but I just wanna give value to that. That there might be new ways of explaining something that translate better through a screen. And that back to the thing of like you can learn from more than one person, is that having all of these different tools in your toolbox, just be conscious of where you’re getting your information from. But I think that we’re headed in a really cool direction with teaching and coaching based on all of these things.
Nate K-G: And in addition to that, I think that another good thing on that same tangent is that you don’t have to be some crazy expert to share some thoughts, right? I talked to so many people, I’m like, “Hey! Go make a post and say that thing!” “But, well, I’m not a, I’m not a coach. Like, I can’t… that’s not for me to say.” It is for you to say, because like you said, that’s how the sport evolved, was everyone just sharing what they knew or what they thought they knew, right? Because that’s how everyone kind of learns.
And even if it’s not the most perfect thing to say, if you’re moving someone in the right direction and it’s just some advice, it can be very useful. And I think a really good method to do that authentically is to, is if someone’s asking you about something or if you wanna create a post or whatever online, or if you wanna meet up with someone in person and, and they’re asking you something, you can say, “here’s what I think. Here’s how I learned. Here’s what made sense to me. I’m not super high level coach or whatever.”
However, you wanna qualify, “I’m not a super high level coach or whatever, but this is what made sense to me. And I learned from… insert the following people.” Right. “Something that helped me was blank,” Or if we’re going all the way back to like learning a new skill, “I learned this new skill because I saw it from this person.” Right? And just like, the point is to always source and to qualify your level and if you do that very quickly, literally saying, “I’m not a coach, but this is what helped me. I learned from Celina, Chris, Mike Fry, Nick, Nate, whoever.” That gives you free reign to talk about anything that you might wanna talk about in a very authentic way that still fits with the culture of the sport in my mind. Do you guys feel the same way about that?
Chris Walker: Hundred percent. Oh, I just wanted to add like one more final thought to the whole, like learning from multiple people and how valuable that really is. Cause through out own journey in those six years, I’ve been learning from so many different people and trying to learn, squeeze as much information out of each of those people, whether it was you, Mike, all my chats with Celina on the footwork, like every person I’ve tried to just squeeze what I can get out of like knowledge that they have.
And one person in music that I always like admired for this concept was Eminem when he first like in the first five, 10 years of him kind of exploding in popularity. And the reason was because when I was in music and I was studying and we were like learning about composition, one of the things that always stuck with me is our music teacher said to us that you all have your favorite artists.
So you’re gonna try and make music that sounds like them. But that’s not how like inspiration and learning works because all your favorite artists didn’t just pick their one favorite artist. They looked at like dozens of artists and they looked at their inspirations and that what went back up the tree and Eminem was famous for having like his list of inspirations was like 40 different people long, like four times longer than the average, like lyricist. And that’s what allowed him to study so much to become so apt at the way he would use words. And he was just learning from everyone, not just this one person. So I just wanted to add that in there because it’s, I think is a very valuable thing to take away from this. So that’s, that’s that.
Nate K-G: Yes. Yes. That was… that was a very good thing to add actually.
Things that you guys wanna see more of in the future. What would you like to see? Continue to grow, continue to take shape besides the sport as a whole?
Chris Walker: More people doing speed training.
Nate K-G: Oh my gosh. Thank you. Thank you, dude! I’m so glad that you said that speed training is the single most undervalued and best thing to be working on, to improve every single piece of your jump rope. Period. Speed step will help everything. Absolutely everything! It is the pinnacle of efficiency with a single rope. It makes everything better. Okay. Thank you, Chris. Other things you wanna see more, Celina?
Celina Furman: This is like a sport direction thing, but I am excited to see the online world shift in the person. I wanna see more meetups. I wanna see official events like jump rope conferences. I wanna see specialized competitions that are based on this type of jumping, like stylistically and like Jump Off. I wanna see creativity. Yes, leagues. I want to see more jump rope in schools. I want it to be more accessible. I want it to be more widespread.
So I guess my visions are more sport level. I don’t really care, it is what it is. I wanna see things in person. I’m excited for that to come back.
Chris Walker: I think like, to like continue on that thought. Like, I’m also very excited to see that happen. And I know me and you, me and you, Nate have talked about this a lot in reference to skateboarding, but this happened in skateboarding like 15 years ago, where back then there was like one style and it was very restricted, and then out of nowhere it just exploded. Now is like five or six, very uniquely separate disciplines. Whether it’s in bowls or street or whatever.
Nate K-G: Well, Rodney Mullen showed up and he created like most skills that exist. That was kind of like what, like Lee Reisig is the equivalent of Rodney Mullen, you know?
Chris Walker: Literally, right? And yeah, from that point on it just splinted off into things that aren’t even nowhere near what Rodney Mullen did in the first place. Like when it comes to vert and Tony Hawk and things like that. And it only took like the 15 years for it to evolve so far away that these they’re almost like different sports in the same way, that different track and field events.
I know nothing alike, but they’re still grouped the same way. And I’m excited to see, like you said, to how that happens with jump rope. And I think we’re seeing the way certain styles are evolving already, that that will become a thing where that will need to happen in terms of the leagues or the competitions or whatever way.
You’ll have very specific styles that compete because they’re separate from other styles and I’m very excited for that. Cause It means more jump rope.
Celina Furman: And I lied. I do care about the internet. I want the current competitive world to come into the internet, which it has started to, but there is the coolest underground world of jump rope out there and there are people doing the most crazy, insane skills. Like people are like, “what’s the hardest trick you can do?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, like a Hummingbird?” But then you see these jumpers, like at nationals doing the most insane, unimaginable things that no one will ever know about because they’re not on video. They’re not online. And we’re not really meeting in person to teach each other these things and we’re not doing as many shows.
And so I just want to see all of the world collide and I want to see all of the knowledge shared, and I want the competitive world to be better documented than it is right now. And I want it to be, I know we hold it so sacred and like, it’s really cool that it’s this underground sport, but like these people are so talented and they are such athletes and the world needs to see them. It is just, there’s a reason why I have been in this sport for as long as I have been. And I just want people to know that I can’t just keep telling people about it. Like I want them to see it.
Nate K-G: Well, I think the reason… if there’s many reasons, but one of the top reasons I think that we don’t see as much online is that as a competitor you’re wired to think bigger, faster, stronger, better. So why would you create a post, like, let’s say, you know, like I just was watching Lauren Ellis, little Lil Lou Lauren on Instagram, amazing competitor.
She just posted a Sunny D AS or Sunny AS, right? So handstand pulled the rope backwards into an AS Cross behind an knee. Amazing. That’s really hard skill, really, really hard skill. And…
Chris Walker: You add like four more reallys into that sentence.
Nate K-G: You you do, you really do! And she got it with PVC rope and then I think that was yesterday and then today she posted it with a beaded robe, which is even harder to do it with that type of a rope. And so like, if you are the kind of person who’s doing really hard skills like that, why would you then make another post the next day of you doing easy Quadruple Unders?
Because to you, to your frame of mind, why would I do that if I just did this really hard thing? But that I think is the, the catching point for a lot of competitors. You don’t have to post only your newest, hardest, cleanest skill. You can post something that is moderately challenging, something that is just fun, some random idea, right? And that ends up being very useful for other competitors for creativity. It ends up being very useful for recreational jumpers, ends up being great for everyone. Like you were saying Celina, contributing the entire culture.
Celina Furman: Yeah, and I think that it takes the pressure off. So like, as a competitor that was definitely the first thing that I had to overcome when I made an account was like, it’s okay to not post new things all the time, because I used to never, I was like, unless it’s new or like a combo that I’m really proud of, I won’t post it.
So got over that. The other thing with competitiveness is that like you wanna element of secrecy, like this is my routine. I don’t wanna share it with people. Cause then they’re gonna know what I’m gonna do in competition. And that’s fine. And more of a reason for you to post your oddball videos and the things that might be less impressive to you, but they’re going to be impressive to other people. They’re going to inspire other people and you can still get yourself out there. Get the sport out there without giving away your like special sauce.
