Coach Nate KG’s Game-Changing Jump Rope Training Tactics (Ep. 24)

Dizzy Skips (00:46)
Nate KG, thank you so much for joining me on the Jump Rope Podcast. I’m so excited to have you here.

Nate KG (00:51)
I’m pumped to be here. This is going be a good one. I’m really stoked. I’ve listened to like one of your episodes and I’ve tried not to like, it has taken a lot of energy to not listen to more because I wanted to come in really fresh and, I’m really pumped. This is going be a lot of fun. You do a great job. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (00:53)
Yeah.

Well, thank you. really appreciate that.

I’ve listened to some of your episodes as well. And, for the Nate KG podcast, for those out there who don’t know, Nate has his own podcast and it’s fantastic. And one of the things I learned really quickly is I am a, I am a newbie, you know, like all of the acronyms for all of the different, you know, tricks and stuff like that. Yeah. There’s so many acronyms and so many names and you know, that technical stuff so deeply.

Nate KG (01:11)
Mm-hmm.

So many names.

Dizzy Skips (01:28)
So it’s, it’s a thrill to listen to. I learn a lot.

Nate KG (01:31)
Cool, I’m glad, I’m really glad.

Dizzy Skips (01:33)
Yeah.

So Nate, can you tell us where you’re at? Like in the world.

Nate KG (01:37)
Yeah, sure. I’m in Southern California, born and raised. yeah. Pretty much pretty. I can’t complain, especially when we’re talking like East coast, you know, or like middle of the country. It’s we don’t get snow. So I think right there automatically makes it pretty optimal for jumping. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (01:41)
Nice. Good jump rope weather.

Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah, we get snow here in Minnesota, so I deal with that.

Nate KG (01:58)
Yeah, that’s tough.

Dizzy Skips (02:00)
I don’t know, it’s beautiful, it’s fun. I’ve learned to layer, you know? Like I’ve learned to take a hot shower, get out of the shower, put on long underwear, put on a few layers, like four shirts, a couple hoodies, go out and sweat and.

Nate KG (02:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, the nice thing

is you kind of have built in armor protection for jumping. like you’ve got all those layers, like you just won’t get to your skin. So you’re good. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (02:16)
Right.

You know,

I would say that’s right, except that when it’s really cold, beaded ropes, beaded rope smacks on the butt are, ooh, vicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nate KG (02:23)
Mm-hmm.

They’re the worst. They’re the absolute worst. Yeah. It just,

it just gets burned into your soul. Like no, no one gets it too. They’re like, why? Like, I don’t understand. You just told me you spent an hour just being hurt the whole time. You’re like, yeah, it was great. It was awesome. Like, I don’t get it. It’s like, well, you had to be there. You had to be there.

Dizzy Skips (02:33)
I

Yeah, it was the best part of my day!

Yeah. So you have been a professional jump rope coach for over a decade, right? Yeah.

Nate KG (02:50)
It’s been a while. Yeah. Unfortunately,

I don’t know the exact day because like it’s kind of the way it works is like when you get into jump rope, you pretty much already start teaching other people and then it just kind of slowly levels up over time. So like even as I first started jumping when I was a kid, you would just teach people on the team or you would go to workshops and be in charge of like, know, staffing for different groups. And so in the competitive world, the way it kind of works is that, you have a couple, you know, or a team or two.

Dizzy Skips (03:01)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (03:18)
host a workshop, bring in, you know, a hundred or if you’re lucky, a couple hundred different jumpers, all, all youth. And then you choose. Usually just those who are the most skilled, end up teaching little cohorts of, so you’ll be in charge of like three to four kids at a time, depending on how busy it is. So did a lot of that. but that’s very different than coaching adults. It’s not, not even close to being the same because kids are like Gumby.

They just figure it out. You’re like, do the trick, but like just do it a little better. They’re like, oh, a little better. Okay, I got this, you know, it just works. So it’s fun. So that’s how I grew up is like being one of those kids that was learning from the older kids, you know, the ones who were so good. And then eventually, you know, getting to move into a role where I would teach the kids, which is always super fun. And then eventually it moves into a

Dizzy Skips (03:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (04:07)
you know, get it. Once I kind of went to college, it shifted a little bit because when you get to college, you’re a little more focused on career and just more adult stuff because you’re in the adult where you’re trying to get into the adult world anyway. And, uh, so I did a lot of, um, personal training stuff there, kind of learning, learning fitness and that kind of that side of things. Um, and then got connected with Dave Newman over at RX Smart Gear. Um, RX Smart Gear makes originally made jump up specifically for CrossFit. That was kind of the origin. They’ve expanded to.

Dizzy Skips (04:18)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (04:37)
a lot of different types of ropes now. but that was kind of the origins and I got connected with Dave, because he contacted my, my team and wanted us to kind of come in and like try out the ropes and see how it was. And he’s a phenomenal guy. We’ve had a good relationship for a very, very long, very long time. And so he would bring us out to different CrossFit events, regionals, CrossFit regionals, CrossFit games, and we would work in their vendor booth. So they would set up a tent, and kind of have like a spot set up.

Dizzy Skips (04:52)
Cool.

Hmm

Nate KG (05:04)
And then some, mats to jump on, depending on the event, like CrossFit games, it’s a big event. We’d have a lot of mats out, regionals and other smaller ones, not quite as many, but every single time you’d have people come in by asking questions about jump ropes, and then getting a chance to like actually work with them and kind of a quick, like 30 second to three minute, like here’s what you got to do. And then like just getting them to feel a difference in their form immediately, like literally immediately. And so that was kind of a,

Dizzy Skips (05:06)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (05:32)
very eye-opening because it was very different than when you work with adults, especially Crossfitters who are not necessarily at the time, not necessarily interested in jump rope. They just kind of want to get through their workouts, you know, you have to change the way you approach how you’re talking to them completely. So, and then Dave also would do seminars, three hour long seminars, roughly three hour long seminars, just on double-unders and doing consistent double-unders. Not, not what we know, like not like crosses and like free, just a strict regular

Dizzy Skips (05:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Sure.

wow.

Nate KG (06:01)
double under and like how to do that. Three hours of a seminar, not necessarily three hours of double-unders. Yeah. Yeah. No, actually believe it or believe it or not the way the seminar would flow is you wouldn’t even get to the double under until like one and a half, two hours in. Like there’s a lot of prep work and sometimes even longer than that. So that, that seminar really was, where I understood that there was detail and, an actual, an actual process behind

Dizzy Skips (06:02)
Three hours of double under?

Excuse me.

Okay.

Nate KG (06:28)
coaching jump rope. I had taught jump rope casually before. think this is something that most people are familiar with. It has kind of moved into on Instagram anyway. It’s pretty obvious when you see posts all the time, people giving quick tips and stuff. And I think that that’s really awesome because that’s very, it’s really weird. Like jump rope, like as soon as you learn, like, I should probably tell someone how to do this. Like, it’s just like, I don’t know why it just like works that way. And so that is like kind like the general tip giving. That was kind of what I was used to in terms of coaching. then

Dizzy Skips (06:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Nate KG (06:56)
working with Dave and also simultaneously go into like personal training stuff and understanding the body a little different in terms of levers and physics and thinking of it that way. I realized, there’s actually, there’s actually some, there’s a lot of depth here. There’s a lot of depth. haven’t really even fully uncovered, you know? And so then fast forward many more years and then boom, here we are. yep.

Dizzy Skips (07:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s

one thing that I think really comes through in your videos is your deep understanding of body mechanics and, and jump rope in general. I mean, one of the things that, well, you’ve helped me, you helped me with releases. You didn’t know it, but, watching some of your videos, like I, I was just flailing around with releases and you know, I had had input from a coach and, and other people and I’d watched a bunch of videos, but I,

Nate KG (07:29)
nice.

Yep.

Dizzy Skips (07:41)
The clear straightforward way that you illustrate things in your videos, the slow mo, the turning around and showing the different angles just really, really helped me. And, and every time I watch your videos, it just like your understanding of how the body moves, how the rope moves and where you need to be in order to get what you want done, done. It just comes through in spades. So yeah, well.

Nate KG (07:51)
I’m glad.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I appreciate that. I definitely,

it’s like a funny, weird thing, like when you, as I’ve kind of gone through and tried to work on videos and think about this, you kind of do like like a J curve or like you kind of like get like the most complicated it could possibly be. And you’re like, wow, this is too much. How do I simplify everything back down to like three words? So I really try hard to not be too wordy, even though.

Dizzy Skips (08:21)
Right?

Nate KG (08:24)
I still get lots of complaints online. If people say like, talk too much, but you know, yeah. All the time. It’s hilarious. I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know how to not talk too much. So you’re to have to deal with it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (08:28)
Really?

Man, that’s the part I like. I like knowing more about

the mechanics and stuff. I don’t think you talk too much.

Nate KG (08:40)
Well,

I am always long-winded, so I’m always happy, especially on something like this. Just keep on going. yeah.

Dizzy Skips (08:46)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, so that’s one of the things I love about you is that you’re deep, you’re deep understanding about the, you know, the technique and body mechanics and stuff. And you’re no nonsense way of breaking down tricks I also months ago signed up for your kickstart program on your website. You have a 14 Day Kickstart Program. It’s free for beginners. And man, I found that so helpful. Like just, yeah.

Nate KG (09:03)
Nice. Uh-huh. Good. I’m glad.

You still enjoyed it? Because your skills are like, you’re kind of like crushing it. I’m surprised that that was still relevant for you.

Dizzy Skips (09:16)
Well, it was a few months ago, but it doesn’t matter. I can learn from anything. Yeah, yeah, no, it’s super helpful. And then your podcast, I mentioned your podcast already, that’s fantastic.

Nate KG (09:18)
Okay.

Well, I’m really pumped to hear that it helped.

Dizzy Skips (09:31)
And then you have the statement on your site. In fact, so for those who don’t know, Nate has NateFlix, which is a section of his site. if you go to natekg.com, can find it, there’s jump rope combos. There you go. And so there’s like 500 combos there all free to watch all sorts of great stuff. But you have a statement up at the top that says that you’re on a mission to give back as much to the jump rope community as possible.

Nate KG (09:38)
haha

Jump rope combos, yeah. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (09:55)
And I just think that’s awesome. So good on you for doing that. And my question for you is why? Like, why do you want to give back to the jump rope community?

Nate KG (09:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

because I’ve had the pain myself, literally the way I started jumping. I started not to be that guy, but I started jumping back in the day. right. Back before all this fancy Instagram stuff. back in the day it was cool. What are the 10 videos on YouTube that I can rewatch a thousand times? If you go, like the videos, the videos I’ve watched, have like now they’ve been online for like, like think at least 13 or 14 years. And they have maybe 10,000 views.

Dizzy Skips (10:11)
Yeah, right.

Right.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Nate KG (10:30)
pretty sure I’m like 9,999 of those views. literally like, these are not high quality videos either, right? Like these are some, you can see, you can actually count the pixels in these videos and like, and that’s, that’s what I was working with, you know, like a lot of, um, the skills I would, yeah, it was, it was, yeah. I like, I remember like one of my favorites was Shane Windsor, uh, Shane Windsor’s routines and for, just was like a 2000.

Dizzy Skips (10:33)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

8-bit jump rope videos.

Nate KG (10:59)
five 2007 nationals routine or something like that. I might get that. I might have that date wrong, but it was like, it was, it was choppy. And then there was another, there’s a, of my, the first ones, one of the first ones I saw that was so cool was an all star video. The all stars in the United States used to be kind of the, best of the best that were selected across the entire country on a team of like, I think it was like roughly 20 jumpers. Again, youth focused. like,

Dizzy Skips (11:02)
Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Nate KG (11:24)
typically 15 to 17 years old, some of the best jumpers. it was, it was, it was awesome. Like that back in like, I think it was like, seven, like I think somewhere between like, yeah, six to eight, somewhere around there, that range, that team was like, man, not that the later teams were not good, but like, that was like my generation. The right first saw that team and I got to, just, I just love what they did. And I, and those videos, it was really exciting to see the video.

Dizzy Skips (11:37)
Yeah.

Nate KG (11:50)
you just couldn’t really tell what was going on. And so like a lot of the skills that I tried, was like, I think this, like I had to like really work through like what I thought they were doing and what I thought they were working on. And so it wasn’t like now where you get, you know, multiple angles and someone’s shooting 4K, 120 FPS and stuff. It’s like, it’s like good luck. So.

Dizzy Skips (11:53)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, exactly. I mean,

that was back when the iPhone first came out. So like camera phones weren’t as prevalent back then.

Nate KG (12:15)
Yeah,

you actually like had to work hard and like have a system of like wires and converters and stuff to get that, to get that, know, like, what is it? I forget the, I forget the name of it, but like an actual tape, there was a size of tape that I had on one of the first cameras I use. It like a certain size of like a square rectangle tape that you had to like, and later, later on, I had to figure out how to port all that over onto a computer because it just didn’t work. It was really hard, you know? And now you can like,

Dizzy Skips (12:22)
You

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (12:44)
share everything in literally 30 seconds. If you just, you know, throw it up there. So that’s, that’s why, like I, that, that was, that was for me, I was like, all I wanted to do was just figure out as much as I could do and just keep going and going and going and going. And fortunately I came across a Lee Reisig absolute true, like a true legend of the sport. and he had obsessed about this in a, on a level that I didn’t even know was possible.

Dizzy Skips (12:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (13:12)
where he went and created the, he created the true like OG tricktionary. And this was him trying to create a shorthand version of naming skills and kind of like having a way for we can all talk about it. Because the context that Lee was coming from was he had gone to world championships. had been with jumpers who a lot of, know, not everyone spoke English. And so it’s like, how do you have a conversation? How do you work together on these skills, which

Dizzy Skips (13:38)
Right.

Nate KG (13:38)
When you’re in person, it’s not too bad because you can just do the skill and like, yeah, that one, you know, but, but online it’s, harder. So he went through and kind of put together this system and Chris, Chris Walker and I really good friend of mine. we have a lot of fun conversations. we we’ve kind of gone through and Chris has done a tremendous amount of work, like updating the trictionary updating a system. And, all of this is to say that like,

Dizzy Skips (13:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Nate KG (14:03)
to see that and like to work really hard to get those videos, to get the resource of like, there is a system to jump rope. Like there’s all this. I want to put it out there so that it’s not nearly as difficult. And so that you can just focus on doing it and enjoying it and jumping and not spending all of your time searching and trying to gather the information, you know? So yeah, I also like, I just think that jump rope has the potential to be a legitimate.

Dizzy Skips (14:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (14:31)
like sport, like it is a sport, but I mean, in terms of recognition, right? Instead of having a conversation with a stranger and they’re going, yeah, I think I did that when I was in preschool. you mean the sport? Like, I think it has the potential to get there, but I do think that information is one of the key elements that’s required to get there. So, mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (14:35)
Mm-hmm.

You’re right.

Yeah.

Sure. Yeah.

So when exactly did you first start jumping?

Nate KG (14:54)
Probably 2008 ish, I think. I think, I don’t remember the exact day. It’s, you know, plus or minus a couple of years there. So yeah. I had a PE teacher. Actually, yeah, I had a PE teacher who showed us and she would choose to spend one month on a given sport throughout the year. And that’s kind of the way she kind of ran things. I think that’s pretty cool. And one of those months was, well, we have jump rope for heart.

Dizzy Skips (15:01)
Mm-hmm. And why?

Yeah.

Nate KG (15:19)
as one of the months. so that, whatever that month, think it’s like February or something or March. Um, one of those months she would have us jump rope. And so most people, uh, you know, most of the kids were kind of like, it’s kind of fun, but then they kind of get over it. was like, you’re telling me you can do more with this, you know? And I was like, wow. And so then a couple of, uh, at a certain point, uh, actually a lot of, uh, the kids in my class were, were really pumped. And so we all were jumping a lot and we kind of ended up forming a team that way. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (15:35)
Yeah.

Really? Cool. And so when you say you formed a team, did you compete just locally within California?

Nate KG (15:48)
first team I was on. Yeah.

They’re basically the way it was set up. think I believe it’s still set up is that you have regional tournaments. So it’s like grouped by several different States and it’s basically, you know, it’s, know, who has the most teams in their state basically. Yeah. So basically what would happen is we would kind of meet up the way it started is we would meet up before school back in the day. and we would kind of hang out and, just try tricks and have fun, and put things together. And I got.

I don’t know how I got this lucky, but literally it must’ve I, the way I remember it, and this could be wrong, but the way I remember it is somewhere within, I think four to six months from me starting, I think it could, could have been a year, but we’ll just go with four to six months for the sake of the podcast makes it more fun. Um, there was a workshop in Santa Monica, which is not far from where I was. And to put it into context, most of the jump rope was like in Texas or like,

in Idaho or like in different different states, not California. California has like eight teams and we’re a huge state. We only have eight teams. Right. and even within Southern California, there’s like a handful, like there was no reason for us to have a workshop here. If you’re going strictly based on the density of jump ropers, right. Got so lucky. It was the all-star team that I’m super partial towards. was like the group of jumpers. I think really defined at least for me what jump rope.

Dizzy Skips (17:08)
sure.

Nate KG (17:18)
is or was, continues to be, it kind of set the foundation. And they were like, we got to do a full Saturday of like working with all these people. So like Nick Woodard was there, pretty sure Lee Reisig was there, Zev Troxler was there, although he was still one of the people learning at the time, but Zev Troxler was there. Pretty sure Mike was there, Mike Fry, pretty sure Mike Fry was there. Jeff Moss, these names probably don’t mean a whole lot to a lot of people, but like for those in the United States who are kind of around.

Dizzy Skips (17:20)
Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Right. These are the OGs.

Nate KG (17:44)
Oh yeah, like these are like the actual legends, you know, and there’s, there’s more than that. I’m just kind of, you know, I don’t really remember the deep cause like at the time I was like, don’t know who you people are, but this is a lot of fun, you know? Um, but I remember learning, I think I learned wheel with a Lee Reisig and I’m sure, yeah, I was learning from Mike too at some point. So yeah. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (17:47)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Right, right.

Of course, right.

Amazing.

Yeah. So just before we get into more coaching stuff, I’m curious, you personally with jumping rope, what does it do for you? I mean, aside from, you know, it’s your profession and that sort of thing, but like physically, mentally, what do you get from jumping rope? Right? What don’t you get from jumping rope, Nate?

Nate KG (18:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

What don’t I get from it? That’s a better question, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, let’s see. So well, there’s the physical aspect of things, of course. That was a lot more, it’s a little bit less relevant now, but through being a kid up until through college, I would say like once I finished college, it kind of all changed. Like what jump rope was kind of like shifted for me little bit. It didn’t lose anything, it just kind of grew. But I think obviously,

Dizzy Skips (18:38)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (18:42)
jump rope gives you the physical aspect. was, I didn’t understand how like tuned my body was until later, like getting into like real, like real jobs, you know, after college and stuff, you, you start to understand that your body can like not work. And so it’s like, like I was pretty spot on back in the day, you know, like a couple of years ago. So kind of gave me that. there’s, there’s the meditation aspect of it. I think for some people, the meditation is,

Dizzy Skips (18:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (19:08)
nonstop jumping at a low intensity. And that’s something that I’ve played with a lot in like recent, like in recent years. It’s great. mostly for me, the meditation was the absolute focus on whatever it was I was trying to do. And that’s focused across the session that could be focused across months or years as well. Like in terms of like, if you’re focused on going to competition, you are so dialed on that. Like you’re, so into that, that,

Dizzy Skips (19:11)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (19:34)
It’s, just kind of sets your brain a certain way, you know? let’s see, what else has it given me? It’s given me an understanding of like, what it actually takes to get really good at something. Not to say, and that probably comes off kind of weird. I’m not a world champion. So like, I’m not saying that I’m like top of the top, but clearly I’m not. can look at my scores as you can look at the routines. Like that’s not what the level I was at, but it took so much to get to that. And it took so much to learn a lot of these really difficult skills.

Dizzy Skips (19:36)
Sure.

Nate KG (20:02)
that I understand what’s required. And so like, I look at current world champions or even whatever world champions from when I was jumping, it doesn’t matter. Like, I know like the, that intensity is it, it’s a lot, you know, and it’s really easy to watch stuff on Instagram and just like, even for me, like you see a lot of like the same crazy stuff these days, like you see like these, these insane scores. and you’re like, so many people like get this like, yeah, if you’re looking at like top 10 in the world, they’re all getting that, but like what it takes to get to that is, is, is wild.

Dizzy Skips (20:15)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (20:31)
so it gives me a really good appreciation of that. then on the actual jumping aspect on the coaching aspect, it’s kind of a similar, but different thing of like we were talking about earlier, like understanding the discipline behind coaching and what it takes to become a very, like, successful coach in terms of not me, but like, what does it take to be a person who coaches somebody to get a result successfully is what I kind of mean to say. And so like, and it doesn’t matter if it’s.

Dizzy Skips (20:31)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (20:59)
You can take jump rope out of that. It just happens to be what I focus on. But like, if you look across many coaches, you start to see very quickly, like who has spent a lot of time in the discipline of educating other person to get a specific result. Right. There’s that. There’s probably more. I can keep going if you want, but like, those are the first couple that come to mind.

Dizzy Skips (21:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So when, when did you make the decision to start coaching? I know you said earlier, like you, once you start learning jump rope, you kind of want to proselytize, right? You want to like spread the word, spread the good news.

Nate KG (21:24)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, for sure. For sure. I think, I think I started posting on Instagram, like casually, a while back, a while, probably around when I was first got introduced to arc spark here. very, very casually and kind of like chatting here and there with people. But even like then it was before Instagram was really used for jump rope. like, you know, it was a couple of some of the OGs, like I remember,

One of the first, OGs was Chad, who now does a lot with, Crossrope and he’s like one of their trainers, like Chad and I would talk back in the day, you know? So if he probably remembers the yellow gym, he probably knows what that means. But, back when I was jumping at a 24-Hour Fitness, but, Yeah, in terms of like formal coaching was like COVID that’s like, like 2020. It was like, okay, there’s like the hard switch. I think COVID was a

Dizzy Skips (21:56)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Okay.

Nate KG (22:13)
big deal for everyone all over the world for everything and lots of changes there. but yeah, I had done a bunch of coaching and stuff previous to that. So.

Dizzy Skips (22:16)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And how many people are you coaching?

Nate KG (22:27)
Changes, it on what you’re talking about, right? So like one-on-one versus like programs and stuff, different packages and stuff, but I don’t really, I actually don’t have a count off my head. I don’t have a number, but a lot. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (22:28)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no. Yeah, but

people, far as having coaching with you, you can, do one-on-one coaching, but then you also have programs on the site. Like, well, you’ve got NateFlix, which is this huge, helpful resource, but then you’ve got a few different programs, right? Like there’s the jump. I’m gonna.

Nate KG (22:46)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, no, no, you’re good. You’re good. I can, I can lay it out. So, I have the two free things, which is the kickstart 14-Day Kickstart, which is if you’re like super duper brand new and you kind of want to like get your bearings, get it, get like 30 single unders in a row, 50 single owners in a row, some footwork, and then maybe start playing around with some freestyle, you know, that’s all there and a lot of context of like, Hey, here’s what jump ropes about here. Some things you should know about all for free. I just really think that like,

Dizzy Skips (23:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (23:23)
It doesn’t make sense to me to like pay to get your single-unders down in some basic footwork. Like I just, I don’t see why you would do that. I think it makes sense to just kind of get in there. I know it’s business wise, it’s probably the better opportunity, but I think it should be free. The other free thing is a 7-Day Challenge, which is more if you’re into like specifically the freestyle and you want to test yourself. I have a PDF list of, I believe it’s 70 skills and combos in order.

Dizzy Skips (23:36)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Nate KG (23:49)
how you

should do them. So both of those are free. Um, so you can kind of get in there in terms of coaching the packages that I have right now. I have a one-on-one package, um, which obviously we would like in that we do a one hour virtual call plus some other stuff along the way to stay in contact throughout. It’s a monthly subscription. stay in contact, um, and some other resources. And there’s also Free Flow, which is like my primary program, um, which has like 150 something

Dizzy Skips (23:54)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (24:19)
full length module. So every single session is a video module that breaks down the different drills that are in it. Yeah. And so it starts at literally just learn your basic cross, learn a side swing, and then all the stuff like there’s, think, I think there’s just 50 lessons, specifically 50 built on cross swing and the combos you can do with that. And there’s a lot there. Yeah. And so it kind of like really brings you through all the foundations that you would need because jump rope is a system.

Dizzy Skips (24:23)
Wow.

Wow.

Nate KG (24:50)
It’s all, it’s a lot closer to software than to dance. know, like dance, at least I don’t know dance super well, but I’m assuming like when you go through it, if everything feels so independent and different, you know, and in like software, everything’s very clearly related and variables are connected and blah, blah, right? Jump rope’s closer to that than it is to dance, even though it appears to be closer to dance. So all of that, those first 50 lessons really helped to build up exactly the patterns you’re going to use later.

Dizzy Skips (25:02)
Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (25:18)
fixing

all the mistakes now that usually creep up later on. And then after those 50, you got a hundred more, a bunch of other stuff, bunch of fun freestyle. So that’s kind of where things stand right now.

Dizzy Skips (25:25)
Yeah.

Interesting.

was going to ask like when putting together a program like that, how long did it take you to realize, here’s the progression that I want to take people through or here’s the logical progression of learning things? Because there’s, I mean, a billion different combinations of things that you can do in Jump Rope, right? And if I start with basic bounce and then try to do releases next, I’m going to be really sad.

Nate KG (25:46)
Yep. Yep.

Yes,

I’ve gotten, I’ve heard, I’ve gotten some flack and some feedback of like, there’s no right way to like, don’t learn in a certain order and jump rope. then other people were like, I have to, I can only learn in the right order. You know, the thing that I’ve been really racking my brain over this last year, roughly 10 months a year, is like, which one is it? And a better question is, it be both? And I don’t really have an entire answer for you yet. It’s still kind of in the middle of like testing that.

Dizzy Skips (26:02)
Yeah.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (26:18)
If you’re asking the question, can you have both a linear and nonlinear progress? Can you have someone go in order and also not need to go in order? I think the answer is yes. Um, and I’ve been working on that and trying to put that into action, but it’s, uh, still a little bit too early to 100 % tell.

Dizzy Skips (26:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

But it seems like there’s, I mean, it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole bunch of basic skills that like, if you can get those down they’re the, they’re the building blocks of everything else. one of the other people I interviewed recently, they were saying that, once, you know, once they got this basic foundation of skills, then adding other things on top of that was easier. And I know my experience, you know, was basically I,

Nate KG (26:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (27:00)
found some cool jumpers on YouTube and was like, my God, I gotta do this. Like how, this is amazing. I love this dance rope stuff. then followed a ton of people on Instagram and you see people of all different skill levels. Like you don’t see a lot of people just doing basic bounce and you see all sorts of things. And everything looked like magic to me and I wanted to try everything, but I…

Nate KG (27:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (27:24)
I felt like, you know, I gotta, I gotta get some basic footwork down. I gotta be able to, you know, move on my feet before I start introducing other things. When someone is a new jumper in their

Nate KG (27:27)
Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (27:35)
really wanting to learn more skills, what is a logical speed progression of learning skills? Like how do you tell people, hey, you know, I want you to do this today and then learn this tomorrow and this the next day, or are we working on basic bounce for a month?

Nate KG (27:51)
So there’s a, think rather than having a list, well, I’ll say it this way that you have prerequisite skills for everything, right? So you, and we have to take it to the extreme. So like, you will not be able to do a cross if you cannot do a single under. It sounds kind of like, well, yeah, right. But like, we kind of need to start there. So if you want to do a toad cross, can you do a toad cross?

Dizzy Skips (28:09)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (28:13)
without doing a basic cross. Maybe you probably like could brute force it, but man, that’s gonna be a struggle. And like, I’m not talking like, you’ve done some jumping and you just haven’t tried a cross yet. I mean, like if you’re doing a single and if you’ve never done a side, so you’ve never done a cross, you cannot do those skills and you go straight to a toad, you’re gonna really struggle and you’re probably not gonna see success. If you do, it’ll be either by accident or you will take a very, very long time and not be a fun process.

Dizzy Skips (28:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (28:39)
So there

are prerequisite skills. If you want to have those prerequisite skills, but there are also soft prerequisite skills. So let’s take, for example, a strength skill. If we have a double under frog, so you rotate, you jump in the air, you rotate the rope underneath your feet and you land on a handstand. Pretty intense skill. I think we can all agree, like you need to know how to do a handstand before trying that. Because if you just chuck your body, you’re probably gonna hurt yourself pretty bad.

Dizzy Skips (29:04)
Yeah

Nate KG (29:08)
And even when you know how to do a handstand, you can still hurt your body pretty bad, ask me how I know. But if you have someone who’s so, and you actually do see this relatively frequently, not all the time, but usually with pushups. If you have someone who’s absurdly strong, take a gymnast, a competitive level male gymnast, and you put a jump rope in his hand, and you go jump in the air, land on a handstand, but then pull the rope underneath your foot. He’s probably gonna do it. But he never did a double under.

Dizzy Skips (29:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (29:35)
Or let’s assume in this case, he hasn’t done a double under before, right? He may not even need to know what a double under is at all, but certain skills, if they’re, if the skill level for that item is so high, you can kind of jump to the next level. and so you have these hard prerequisites, you have these soft prerequisites. you need to kind of know what those are, which is very tricky because most times you just don’t, you just try stuff and there’s nothing wrong with that. the framework that I tell.

Dizzy Skips (29:36)
Mm-hmm, right.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Nate KG (30:00)
everyone I coach and I try to talk about as much as possible online is that, you have two different ways to train. You have training for completion and you have training for efficiency. They’re related. Yeah, they’re related, but the inverse of each other. if you train for efficiency, you’re trying to change your form. You’re trying to improve it. You want to make your form better, which means you’re going to sacrifice the success of the skill. You might have a mistake. You may fail the rep in quotes.

Dizzy Skips (30:10)
I love that you talk about this.

Nate KG (30:29)
Right. But if you look back, if you take a video of what you’re doing or if someone’s watching you and you look at that rep and they go, yeah, you know what? You did make that change. You did move your arm here. You did use your wrist more. You did move. You did do that change. That rep is a success. Even if the, if the skill didn’t work. So if you’re doing your basic cross and one arm is like a lot higher than the other and you did a rep and then you brought that arm down and your hands were even, but you still miss because of whatever doesn’t matter. You’re still good.

Dizzy Skips (30:45)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (30:58)
Completion is the opposite. Completion is it doesn’t matter what it looks like, you just gotta get done. And yeah, and you would think that like, I don’t want to like, like I like good form. I shouldn’t do that. Actually you should because a lot of, and this is like, when I say always, I literally like a hundred percent of every call I have with every person I coach. We talked about this at some point. And it’s when you’re, when you’re drilling, it’s good to drill. But if you do too much drilling,

Dizzy Skips (31:02)
Get her done.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (31:24)
you can waste time and it can get frustrating and boring. And what you need to do is also try stuff that looks exciting. That might be a little bit too hard for you. And it’s fine if you can’t do it right now, but you just give it a shot because when you level up and you try stuff, that’s more difficult. The moment you do that, the stuff you were working on before gets easier. So for example, if we have a basic cross and a side swing to an open, and then we go immediately into like, let’s do side swing to cross.

Dizzy Skips (31:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Totally.

Nate KG (31:53)
Like no, no breaks, right? Swing, cross, and then maybe a second cross. There’s a combo, right? Swing, cross, cross, open. That’s going to be a lot harder than just doing a cross by itself, especially if you’re like brand new. And so you may not succeed at that combo, but working through that for 10, 15, 20 minutes, by the time you go back to that basic cross, you’re like, yeah, this isn’t a big deal. Like you might, you might still like have to work on it for sure, but your brain changes. And that to me is one of the biggest.

Dizzy Skips (31:57)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Nate KG (32:20)
the most important parts of completion training is, is to kind of feel that difference because it accelerates your efficiency training. They work together that way. And also like at the end of the day, like we are here to have fun. competitors are trying to compete, so it’s a little bit different, but like the majority of us, especially the adults, like we’re here to like have fun. And so it doesn’t matter if it takes long. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re slow at progressing. You’re probably not anyway, but it doesn’t matter if you are. All that matters is that you are seeing

Dizzy Skips (32:46)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (32:49)
increase in your skills are getting better, they are improving at some rate, month to month or like every six to 12 months is what I like to focus on. So yeah, I don’t know if that answers your question. I kind of went a little off track, but yeah, there you go.

Dizzy Skips (32:52)
Right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, no, that’s great. And I really like that discussion of completion versus perfection, basically. I mean, because, and I had never really thought of it that way, but now that you mention the idea of trying something that you haven’t, you know, that stretches your skills, basically, and sort of just getting it done without maybe it being beautiful, helping.

Nate KG (33:25)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (33:28)
the thing that you learned before become easier. That’s totally been my experience, but I never thought about it that way.

Nate KG (33:30)
Yeah.

Right. Well,

the reverse is true too. If you never work on your, if never drill anything, you never work on your efficiency, you’re to get hard locked out of other skills later. Like you’re not, you’re just not gonna, you’re not going to have a choice. It just won’t work. and a really, a really simple, but important example of this is when people are in the toad cross for the first time. know the toad cross is like not the most popular for people when they’re looking at, believe me, I have plenty of data to support this. People don’t like the toad cross as much until they do it. But when they first practice it,

Dizzy Skips (33:41)
Right, right.

Right.

Nate KG (34:03)
they’ll swap their hand position. So when you do a toad cross, you put your hands in a cross and then the hand that is underneath or that is sandwiched between your top arm and your stomach should go underneath the leg that it is pointing to. So if my right arm is underneath, it points to my left leg. goes underneath that leg. What a lot of jumpers will do is they’ll almost get this right, but they’ll take their top arm that is pressing down on the other arm and they’ll put that one underneath the leg.

Dizzy Skips (34:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (34:31)
And so you can imagine if you’re in that position, if you’re in a normal toe cross, your top arm is free. It can move around. It’s all good. If you’re in the other version, that arm that’s underneath is stuck. It cannot move away and it’s locked. Yes. And so that version, we would call it a tucked toad or a T-toad. Very different. so it’s not, it is a doable. Absolutely. Is it way, way harder? yeah. And so people will be like the toad crosses like impossible. Like there’s just no way I can do it.

Dizzy Skips (34:42)
You’re locked.

Yeah.

Nate KG (34:59)
which makes sense because if you haven’t worked on a toad before and you go to a tuck toad, back to what we talking about earlier in terms of prerequisite skills and stuff, like yeah, it’s gonna be pretty much impossible because like it just doesn’t make any sense. And so this is where like working on your drills, working on efficiency, understanding the details of it and taking the time to like just do a toad toe catch and like stop, check your arms and see if you’re good. That is really important because then you go, my arms are in the wrong spot. Now let me just change them real quick.

Dizzy Skips (35:06)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (35:26)
Okay, now this starts to feel like reasonable. so, you, you need them both, but it’s just, it’s just a case of balance, right? You need to have both completion and efficiency training. the efficiency is not about being perfect. It’s about understanding the details and understanding your jumping. And when you decide you want to make a change or adjust something, you can, and you know what to do, or you have some type of a feeling to work from. So. Yep.

Dizzy Skips (35:30)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sure, yeah.

When you’re working with newer adult jumpers, what are the top three struggles that you see them have or mistakes that people make or misconceptions that they have when they start?

Nate KG (35:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we’re kind of already going through it because completion and efficiency is big.

I think what’s important is the things that they, is the way that they don’t realize how they’re thinking. And it’s the thinking that is, it’s so simple when it’s laid out, it is like nearly impossible to bridge the gap unless someone says it. And so the first one is the comparison. Everyone ends up comparing their skills to other people as if it’s like, as if they should be learning the same way. Like, so

Dizzy Skips (36:17)
Okay.

Nate KG (36:35)
Let me lay it out for you. If you have, let’s see, the same environment, meaning weather environment, the same physical resources available to you, a gym, same type of gym. If you have the same mat, the same jump rope, the same physical history, surgeries or health things. If you have the same sports history, if you stretch the same, if you have the same amount of time per week to allocate towards a jump rope, if you have the exact same meal plan, if you have the same body structure, if you have all that, then you can compare yourself.

Dizzy Skips (36:40)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (37:04)
Turns out, it never happens, because no one has the same thing. So when people go online, they go, this person learned so fast. It’s like, yeah, but were they jumping for three hours every single day? Also, what does it matter, because your skills got better, right? Like you, a month ago, could barely do a cross, and now, a cross doesn’t even register in your head anymore, because you’re so focused on EB, or mic release, or these other things, you just do the cross automatically. And so what’s…

Dizzy Skips (37:06)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (37:31)
Exciting about jump rope is also an opportunity for comparison, right? There’s always more to do so it can, if you’re not paying attention, it can seem like you’re always behind. And so you have to really take the time to remember, like, as long as you’re seeing progress every, you know, monthly, assuming your training, right? You can’t be like, I practiced once, I didn’t see progress. Like that doesn’t count. Right. But that’s a big thing. and then.

Dizzy Skips (37:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Nate KG (37:56)
being very specific about when you do learn stuff, not jumping the gun from never succeeding a skill to trying to want to be perfect right away. This is the other thing that I talk to literally every single person. And you would be surprised. have folks that I’ve worked with for literally for years, like nonstop. And we will have this conversation like once a year, like sometimes more. It’s like, we’ll learn a skill and I’m trying to think of a good example of this.

Dizzy Skips (38:06)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (38:24)
Probably the EB cross is one of the better examples. People love that one. they want to learn the EB cross. And so it’ll go from like, I don’t even understand how I’m supposed to jump like that. Like my hand’s behind my back, like what’s going on. Right. And then they’ll get one successful rep and it’ll be like, you know, in the context of, say we did a coaching session, this is usually the way it plays out. We’ll do a coaching session, they’ll get the first EB cross. Super awesome feeling pumped. And I’ll get a message from them like later that week of like,

“I’m still working on my EB. It’s just like, it’s just so horrible. Like it’s not good.” And I’m like, take it easy. Like you got your first one a couple of days ago, fast forward three more weeks. And it’s like, “yeah, I’m getting my EB. It’s it’s just not perfect. Like it’s just like, it’s so bad still.” And what this real, what this comes down to is once that first rep is done, the brain just switches to like, why can’t I do this every single time? Because that’s what I see other people do. Yeah. And it’s like what you want to do and the solution

Dizzy Skips (39:13)
Right. Yeah.

Nate KG (39:19)
that I use for this one, I’m talking to the jumpers, especially on coaching calls, is what I call compulsories. Not a unique idea, but I like to talk about it a lot as it comes from like gymnastics. You have a certain group of skills. It could be one. I usually like to say like one to five skills. You could do more if you wanted to. Luke Boone did this and because Luke’s looks crazy. Luke did this with like 50 skills every single session, but with compulsories you take, Luke’s is different, but it’s like a similar idea.

With the way I like to use compulsories for people I coach or anyone who’s listening, you take those one to five skills. You do 10 reps, only 10, 10 reps of that skill on both sides. If you can, sometimes you can sometimes like there’s still value, even if you fail all of them, but that’s a different thing. so you do those 10 reps and it’s a stop between each rep. So if you have basic cross, you do a couple of single unders, do that cross back to a single owner, stop the rope 10 times both sides.

And then, you count how many times you succeeded. It’s that simple, but you gotta do it every single time you show up and you need to not compare yesterday’s practice to today’s. You compare this week’s average to last week’s average. So for the cross, if we do cross, let’s say like I’m jumping and I do 10 and let’s say my dominant side, I get six out of 10 and then I get seven out of 10. Then I get four out of 10. And then my, my non-dominant is probably less. It’s probably like two, three, and four.

Dizzy Skips (40:32)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (40:47)
Um,

I’m just looking for that to go up by like one or two every week or every month. So then like maybe the next week I average around seven out of 10. Right. And then maybe then, you know, three more weeks goes by and average eight or nine out of 10. That’s what we’re looking for. And so will you get to a 10 out 10 skill? Absolutely. But what it takes to get to a 10 out of 10 skill will be a different process than what it took to get to a four or five out of 10. So basically the way you should look at your skills is.

Dizzy Skips (40:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (41:16)
one out of 10, it’s like, that’s just getting it for the first time. And what it takes to get to that first rep is very different than going from, I’ve done one rep. Now I want to get it more times than not. More times than not translates to like the six to eight out of 10, six to nine out of 10 range, right? The 10 out of 10 or.

Dizzy Skips (41:28)
Yep.

Right.

Nate KG (41:35)
but I like to call a hundred out of 10, that’s really what people mean. 10 out 10 is not really, it’s actually what they want every single time they try it, they want to succeed and make it look good. So that’s like actually a hundred out of a hundred, right? That’s what we’re really talking about. So that level takes, it’s a, every single one of these is a different process and I can go through it if you want, but these are kind of like the main things that people tend to miss with their jumping is the comparison and the perfection. And so like really sitting down and like just,

Dizzy Skips (41:38)
Yeah, right.

Right, right.

Nate KG (42:03)
write it out or say it out loud. Like what is it that you’re actually expecting here? Cause the second you say it, you’re like, that’s actually kind of not very reasonable, is it? Like, no, but does it mean you’re never gonna get there? No, you can get there. We just have to be a little bit more patient and be a little bit more specific about how we’re approaching the training and trying to get there. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (42:11)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Cool. What about like when you’re working with folks, what about warmups? Like how do you warm up? How do you advise jumpers to warm up before they actually get into it?

Nate KG (42:30)
Mm-hmm.

First bit of advice, that’s the most useful. You’re gonna think I’m playing a prank here, but do it. Yeah. It’s all good. Yeah, that’s honestly the amount of times I’ve had conversations about warmups and then like followed up with the person. like, how’d it go? They’re like, I didn’t do it. And I’m like, okay, cool, sweet. Like, all right. So like literally you should start by doing it. Any warmup is gonna be better than no warmup, so do that.

Dizzy Skips (42:50)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (42:57)
Um, in terms of specific, um, specific stuff, need to kind of get the, like, literally get the body warm. So if you’re, if it’s cold or like you’re in an area where it’s like, you gotta be able to like physically get warm and like a little bit of sweat, nothing crazy, but like just warm up. that could be literally a million different things, uh, for jump rope, especially for someone who’s newer to jump rope, I would probably recommend not using jump rope as a warmup. You can later on for sure, but it tends to just end up being too much volume in the day. Um, so.

Dizzy Skips (42:57)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Nate KG (43:27)
move around, you know, do a little bit of jogging in place, go run a lap, just bounce from side to side, do some shadow boxing, whatever, you know, put on some music and start flailing your body and dancing, you know, you know, yeah, exactly. And so like, it just, it literally just gets you loose and it gets your muscles like working and the blood flowing. Once you’ve got that, do some stretching. There’s a lot of debate over what types of stretches are best, right? You can have fun.

Dizzy Skips (43:39)
That’s what I do.

Right.

Nate KG (43:56)
going into that debate online, everyone is highly opinionated. As long as you’re actually getting those muscles stretched out and it’s safe, you know, and you’re actually feeling the muscle stretch, you’re good. Most people avoid stretching because they do it in a way that is extraordinarily painful and way more than it needs to be. All you need to do to stretch is get to the point where you feel the tension in your muscle, then just hold it there for 30 seconds and then just breathe and be calm. You don’t want to sit there and like, and this is a

Dizzy Skips (43:59)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (44:26)
This is a mistake that I have made over and over and over, over and over and over. It’s, don’t know why it’s a thing, but like I will stretch and then go to the point of like massive pain. That’s actually counterintuitive because the point of stretching is to get the muscles to effectively unlock. There are things, these little devices in your muscle called Golgi tendon bodies, devices sounds technological. It’s not that it’s just the way the muscle work is works is that there’s a thing called Golgi tendon bodies that are basically the safety locks for the muscle. And so.

Dizzy Skips (44:29)
you

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (44:55)
They literally like lock together and do not allow the muscle to stretch too far. And so like, that’s why when you start stretching initially and you’re not warmed up, you’re like, wow, I’m really stiff. But if you actually just pick your five favorite stretches and repeat them for 30 seconds each on both sides for three rounds, you’re going to feel a lot more stretched out because you’re actually letting your body like, no, like we’re good. Like I’m not doing some kind of crazy activity and like about to snap my muscles. Like I’m just warming up, you know,

Dizzy Skips (45:00)
Okay.

Nate KG (45:24)
And it’s like, okay, cool. And so then those, those Golgi tendon bodies kind of like unlink a little bit and kind of let the muscle be a little longer. there’s a little more to that too. There’s connective tissue. Connective tissue is kind of a different deal than muscles, but is a different deal. But, in terms of the stretching at the beginning, if you pick again, those, you know, five ish, you can do more, you could do less favorite stretches, or just whatever you kind of dig and do them for 30 seconds each and don’t push it.

Dizzy Skips (45:24)
Yeah.

little flexible.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (45:52)
just get to the point where you can feel a little tension on your muscle and just breathe and just relax and like really focus on letting the tension go from your body because that’s when you actually do get the result from stretching. And then guess what? It ends up being kind of nice. Who would thought that that’s that’s now that’s a thought stretching feeling good, you know, and, it actually can, you just have to be very patient and go very slow with it. And I think that that’s where people get stuck is they don’t want to spend.

Dizzy Skips (45:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (46:21)
15 or 20 minutes doing that, which you don’t need that. You can get it done in 10. It’s just that if you actually are really taking the time to do these sets and reps and doing it this way, it tends to end up a little bit longer. There are definitely times where I’ve spent 40 minutes warming up. So yeah, you don’t need to do that, but like that’s kind of the structure I would say for the warmup. First of all, do it. Second of all, get the body like warm and then pick some stretches to just repeat over and over and over. There are, I’m sure there are some stretches that are better than others.

Dizzy Skips (46:23)
Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah, me too.

Mm-hmm.

Do you have favorites?

Nate KG (46:50)
Oh yeah, I favorites. I like the front split. I’m a little partial towards that because I did a little bit of gymnastics training when I was a kid. And so I like that one. It’s pretty painful to be honest with you. Like I can’t really do it where it’s not painful. So there’s that problem again. But I do it anyway because it really stretches out my hips like better than other options that I’ve ever found. So I like that one a lot.

Dizzy Skips (46:57)
Me too.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So when you say the front split, are you putting one foot forward, one foot back, or are you doing side to side and then bending forward?

Nate KG (47:21)
Yes. No,

I do side splits as well. but I’d like the front split a lot for the hips. and I try to push it as much as I can, but again, like if I’m actually training that I’ll do like two to three sets of it, which takes kind of a lot. it’s almost like it’s own workout cause that one’s a little more intense, but I like that one. I like obviously a calf stretch. Can’t go wrong with the cast. I kind of need it kind of need it with jump rope, you know,

Dizzy Skips (47:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a wise

one.

Nate KG (47:47)
It’s a wise one. Yeah. I like the couch stretch as well. I know if you’ve seen that one. Um, so, uh, basically imagine you’re, like you have a couch behind you and you kind of, you kind of go on the ground and you have your knees on the floor. You put one leg up and like a lunge. goes in front of you. The other leg, you kind of go on your knee, but you stick your ankle kind of on the couch and you put your shin against the base of the couch. Um, if you look up couch stretch, you’ll, you’ll see it very quickly, but

Dizzy Skips (47:51)
No, what’s that one?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Okay.

Nate KG (48:15)
It’s a very deep quad stretch. So not ideal if you’re not comfortable with stretching your quads, but if you do a lot of jumping, it’s pretty great. So, um, I like that one a lot. Uh, that’s definitely a favorite of mine. Um, yeah, think those are probably the top, top ones.

Dizzy Skips (48:18)
Hmm, sounds like it.

Yeah.

One of the things you mentioned

that I think about a lot and I don’t hear people talk about a lot really is breathing in jump rope. And I wondered like, do you have to coach people about that? Like I, I try to be very conscious of my breathing, whether I’m stretching and warming up or while I’m jumping, just because to me, a lot of the benefit is really meditative, you know, like I stress release And I’ve found that, when, when I’m

Nate KG (48:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (48:57)
trying to learn a trick and I’m frustrated about it something like that, if I pay attention, my breathing gets erratic. But if I focus on my breathing, then things tend to flow better.

Nate KG (48:58)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Breathing, people do ask me about it occasionally. I don’t have the greatest answer for you because if we talk about breathing, it comes back down to like where the heart rate is at. That’s really what it is. And so it seems like it’s jump rope related, but like if you go run, like there’s a way to think about breathing for sure. But if you go run a mile and you’ve never run a mile and you’re like struggling through the entire thing, the only thing is like, just make sure you do breathe. Cause like you’re gonna, you’re kind of gonna have a hard time like figuring out the breath at first. So I think

Dizzy Skips (49:29)
Yeah, right.

Nate KG (49:33)
breath work is probably a little bit more on at least the intermediate side because you need to have a skill level where you have like, obviously like with you, you can focus on it, right? Because you have a skill level where you’re actually able to kind of chill out and like focus. but I don’t think you need to focus on it necessarily. And we get into like super, like if we get into the completion side of training where you’re like doing hard stuff for the first time, like maybe it’s part of slowing down or like focusing on the change you want to make, but

Dizzy Skips (49:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Right.

Sure.

Nate KG (50:02)
Um,

on that level, not so much, think when you are hanging out and kind of cruising, let’s say a minute plus of just jumping relaxed, right? Like if you’re at that level where you can do that, um, then you can breathe, then you can think about breathing. think it’s just whatever the tempo is that works for you. think, maybe like in for two to three jumps out for two to three jumps can work. But again, that’s very much based on like, where’s your heart rate at? You know, so.

Dizzy Skips (50:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah. I’ve posted a few videos recently of me jumping in the, you know, below freezing temperature and you can see the breath. can monitor my breathing very easily. Yeah. It’s the Viking blood, I guess. When you’re coaching jumpers what is a, what is a good practice length? How long are you advising your

Nate KG (50:39)
I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how you do that. I don’t have that in me. I respect that. There you go. Nice.

Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (50:56)
your folks to practice?

Nate KG (50:57)
It’s hardest to figure out when you’re brand new because you’re not really sure what is too far yet. Right. And so it’s tricky. The thing you want to avoid is going so far where you get shin splints. Right. And so what shin splints or any kind of, injury that could come specifically from jump rope, what it means is you’ve done too much too soon. And so you might be able to physically accomplish a lot in a session, but the endurance, the total volume across a week.

Dizzy Skips (51:02)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (51:25)
It was too, too much. Right. And so how much you can do really depends on prior sport history. really depends on prior jumping history. If you’re, if you have not done other sports, if you just brand new getting into it like, is like, you’re just getting in right now. This is the first time that kind of trying to do some kind of activity or the jump rope is the first thing you’ve done. Um, start with a very specific number, maybe 50, 75 total jumps start there. Right. And I’m talking about someone who’s like,

Dizzy Skips (51:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (51:55)
just picked up a jump rope, brand new. Start there and count or to some degree know the exact number. See how you feel the next day. And what you wanna do is you wanna undershoot it. You wanna do too little. That’s what we’re looking for. Because if you do too little, then you’re fine. You can hop back in the next session and you can do maybe a little like five, 10 % more. Go from 50 to 60. Go from 75, maybe to like 100-ish, right? And so when you know,

Dizzy Skips (51:57)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (52:25)
The volume, when you know the total amount of jumping you’re doing, then you actually can make a very clear adjustment. If you’re just jumping and you’re like, I don’t know, it hurts. It’s like, well, what were you doing? Like, how do we work with that? You know, also technique is a huge piece of this too. So you might, um, 50 total jumps, staying on the balls of your feet, nice and relaxed and light versus 50 jumps of slamming your heels into the floor and hitting the ground very hard and bending your knees a lot.

Dizzy Skips (52:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (52:54)
is a very different 50 jumps, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And so.

Dizzy Skips (52:56)
Absolutely, I can testify to that. Yeah, some of my early

jumping I was like slamming my legs down and having fun dancing like crazy and go home and wow, my knees, my, you know, just does not feel great.

Nate KG (53:03)
Mm-hmm.

No, no, exactly. And so that’s like, when we, when it comes to the volume, like I’ve had jumpers, who were competitive athletes prior in different sports who will literally do like three to four hours, sorry, three to four sessions of three hours a week. So they’re, they’re clocking like nine to 12 total hours of jump rope practice. That’s obviously not, you’re not consistently jumping the entire time. This is more of like a freestyle practice where you do a combo and you stop, but they’re still, they’re still pushing it pretty hard.

Dizzy Skips (53:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (53:37)
But I’ve also had jumpers where you got to squeeze in what you can get. You’ve got 30 minutes and you’re trying to not stop. And you’re trying to just keep going like as much as you possibly can. I have someone I’m working with who does freestyle. He does learn in pieces. He’s a lot more focused on, workouts and having a consistent plan for himself.

Dizzy Skips (53:37)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (53:55)
So what we did is we started with rounds of 30 seconds. and we, we would kind of, I, you know, I like freestyle. I’m going to have him do a little freestyle, but like we would start with 30 seconds of basic jumping and then throwing in whatever he could do. Maybe a side swing here or there. No rhyme or reason, just kind of go with it. Right. Do 30 seconds. and it started off nice and nice and slow and easy. Then we worked on, keeping the knees a little bit straighter.

Dizzy Skips (54:08)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (54:19)
they’re going to bend, just not a crazy amount of bending on the balls of his feet. Like we talked about, and we went from, you know, five to 10 total rounds in a session with a lot of rest of 30 seconds. And over the months and over the years of his training, we’ve gotten up to the point where now we do, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll do 18 to 20 minutes of total work time, not resting and stuff, but have total like active jumping time, usually in sets of two minutes.

Dizzy Skips (54:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Nate KG (54:48)
So he’ll

do two minutes of jumping nonstop. He’s relaxed on his feet. he, sometimes he has a metronome where he jumps to like 120 to 125 BPM. A lot of times he just has music and he’s rocking out. and he’ll go for those two minutes and then we’ll take a rest for roughly two minutes, give or take 30 seconds or a minute. then we’ll hop right back into the next round and go until he’s done 18 to 20 total minutes of work time. And that volume works very well.

Dizzy Skips (55:00)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (55:15)
for him, but sometimes he’s like, you know, I’m feeling a little bit of like my ankle, my shin feeling, I’m like, cool, let’s drop the volume down to 12 minutes and see how that feels. And so he’ll do that his next session and then he’s feeling better. He’ll hold at that 12 minutes for a few sessions to go, okay, I’m feeling better. Let’s move it back up. Right. And so like, that’s kind of an example of someone who’s a little bit more like workout focused. There’s not really an answer for this in terms of freestyle because with freestyle it’s just like, well, if you’re obsessed,

Dizzy Skips (55:16)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Nate KG (55:44)
the harder thing is to pull you away. You know what mean? Like you just don’t want to stop. So yeah, exactly.

Dizzy Skips (55:46)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I’ve injured myself multiple times because of that. Like, just one more time with this song. Just one more time.

Nate KG (55:56)
and all the injuries tell me about it. Yeah, the amount of times that I’m like, well, if I just, it’s okay. I’ve done this a lot of times. It’s like, well, but the body has to be ready and conditioned. yeah.

Dizzy Skips (55:58)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I’ve learned the hard way that it’s not for me, it’s not worth pushing it too much because I want to be able to jump tomorrow, you know? And, and I have so many times done, just one more, one more spin of this song or one, one more, you know, 10 minutes of the playlist or whatever. And then the next day I get out of bed and I’m like, my gosh, I’m an old man. Yeah.

Nate KG (56:15)
Yes.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Yeah, totally shot, totally shot. Yeah.

No, think a huge thing for people to remember is that like everyone’s got some kind of like injury or unique thing about their anatomy that makes them need to, they should focus on something specific with their form. I don’t know why. My left trap loves to get pulled on pull-ups. Don’t know why. just have pulled my left trap.

Dizzy Skips (56:42)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (56:53)
so many times on pull-ups. I don’t know. I’ve messed up my lower back a couple of times. like those are things that I have to think about. I’m like, okay, cool. So just have to make sure that I’m, if I’m doing pull-ups, I do them consistently and I’m doing them very gradually and I’m doing stuff that works my back and I’m staying flexible so that don’t pull it again. I need to make sure like my core, my hamstrings, glutes and quads are all balanced. And then I’m doing all of those consistently so that my lower back stays bulletproof and that I’m good to go.

Dizzy Skips (56:55)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Nate KG (57:23)
And so there’s a lot of, this is more of a total fitness kind of subject, like, to with jump rope, you’re probably at some point, you’re probably going to notice something is a little bit off, right? And the more you can define what that is and have a plan for it and test it out, the more you’re like, I’m feeling that thing again. Let me go back to that routine of doing these exercises that I know work for me. and not to circle back to what we talked about before, but like, is like when you, sometimes when you stretch,

Dizzy Skips (57:46)
Yeah.

Nate KG (57:51)
It’s like so painful and it doesn’t even make sense. Why? And it’s because your muscles are imbalanced. The muscle you’re trying to stretch is, is already stretched too thin is not strong enough or is too strong. It has been working too much to compensate for another muscle. And because of that imbalance, you’re like physically not able to get the results that you should. And it’s not that it’s not that stretching sucks. It’s that we need to kind of make sure that everything’s all set and

Dizzy Skips (57:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (58:18)
Jumps a system, the body is a system, right? There is a, there’s a front and back to all the muscles. Every muscle works with another, another muscle. So a little bit of a tangent, but there you go.

Dizzy Skips (58:20)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So what about cool downs? Do you have, do you cool down? Do you have a cool down routine? What’s that look like?

Nate KG (58:31)
yeah. Pretty much the same advice.

Again, first thing, do it. besides warming up, that’s the second one that gets forgotten. You know, you should definitely do that. I think it’s. It depends on what you’re doing. So like, I think I talked with Selena about this a long time ago, on a podcast. or maybe at some point we discussed it, but, if you’re doing really intense, like, like, like really intense training, like on the sports side of things, especially for competitive athletes.

Dizzy Skips (58:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (58:58)
You need a cool down because your body has done so much stuff. It has produced so much energy. There are a lot of different things happening in your body that allow you to perform that way that you’ve got a lot of residual stuff that can be cycled out by a very simple, low intensity moving the body around. And so you need that for jumpers who are just jumping casually or like they’re having fun, but it’s not particularly like, like it’s, it’s like getting you working, but it’s not like crazy, crazy.

Dizzy Skips (59:26)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (59:26)
You can benefit from the cool down. think what’s most important is just to actually get the body to relax. You’d be surprised how many times if you, the two things I’d recommend is obviously at the end of your session when you’re still in it, do your stretches. Do the same stretches you did at the beginning. Like it doesn’t, you can get fancy with it if you want to, but just do the same stuff. Maybe prioritize like your calves because you’re feeling them more. But like actually do two to three rounds.

Dizzy Skips (59:48)
Right.

Nate KG (59:52)
of 30 seconds to a minute of each of those and breathe slowly and feel your body relax. And that’s like amazing. The second thing, this has been a huge hack for me. I am just really good at like my body gets all locked up and stiff at the of the day. So, if you just stretch before bed, like if you’re not going to cool down because you hear me talking about this and you’re like, yeah, then you go to your workout and you’re like, nevermind Nate, like that’s, that’s what’s going to happen. Sure. Ignore that one. But at the very least.

Dizzy Skips (59:58)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:00:20)
do like 10 minutes before you go to bed. Do some side splits, stretch your quads, stretch your calves, stretch your lats, right? Just some basic stuff like arms over your head, like leaning to the side, stretch out the lat, and just hold, but the trick is not to like, be hanging out and like, like left, right, left, right, like touch my leg, okay, I’m done. It’s like, there for a second, like hold the position and do that again. 10 minutes is assuming transition time.

Dizzy Skips (1:00:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (1:00:46)
you’ve basically got like four to five stretches for 30 seconds each side, right? And so if you just do that, your body’s gonna feel better. You’re gonna sleep so much better, like so much better. So that would be kind of the recommendation there.

Dizzy Skips (1:00:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Alright, well I’m have to put a reminder on my phone, stretch before bed tonight. That sounds…

Nate KG (1:01:04)
I’m telling you,

like, if you do it, you’re gonna wake up and go, wow, that was some pretty good sleep. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:01:11)
So Nate, what is next for you in your jump rope journey? I’m also curious, what is your vision for the jump rope community? What’s next?

Nate KG (1:01:19)
I

think we got a lot of opportunity. there’s a lot that we haven’t touched on too much, like the Olympics and stuff like that. Probably don’t really need to get into that as much, but, I think that jump rope, like, like for everyone who’s listening to this, you believe the jump rope is a sport, right? I think there’s a huge ability for it to be, I think it’s, it’s inevitable that it will be seen as a sport, but

it takes a lot to get there. So for me, it’s kind of just focusing on like, what are, what are the projects? What are the systems that are needed to actually support that happening? There’s a lot of gaps in the community, like huge gaps right now that I’m like genuinely shocked have not been swooped up by some of the bigger companies. and so like, I think, I think that what it really is, is just combining, combining

Dizzy Skips (1:02:06)
Hmm.

Nate KG (1:02:13)
what is the absolute fastest, best, most usable knowledge for jumpers to get the most success, the fastest. And how do we connect everybody and how do we like have fun and hang out? And it’s like, obviously if you’ve been in the jump rope world for a little bit, you’re like an app and meetups, which is currently where it’s at. But what I’m trying to think about is like.

Dizzy Skips (1:02:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:02:41)
Like what is, like, what is the absolute best it could possibly be? Like, what is, what is the maximum, right? And like, what does that look like? And so I don’t necessarily have a hundred percent of an answer yet Um, but I think that there’s still a whole lot of work to be done in terms of, well, this might just, I don’t know if this is, this might just be a me thing, but like, when I look at my own coaching materials and stuff, I think that it’s good and it’s successful.

Dizzy Skips (1:02:46)
Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:03:05)
It doesn’t feel complete though. I’m not sure it ever will. I think sometimes like that’s kind of the thing is you just never feel like you’re done. Right. Which is a lesson in itself, but, how far can we push it? What’s the maximum we can get out of this and what’s the best that we can connect everyone and like really come together. Right. Like, cause, meetups are phenomenal. Workshops are amazing. Like you need them, you know, but the problem is we don’t have enough of them because they’re hard to facilitate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:03:11)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I know I don’t out here in the middle of the country.

Nate KG (1:03:35)
That’s

what I’m saying, like it’s

Dizzy Skips (1:03:37)
Yeah,

I know there’s a meetup in London on July 5th. I wish I could go to that one. That would be fun.

Nate KG (1:03:43)
And that’s the thing is you get these like, you get these one-off, well, Chris, Chris does his every year, but, you get these, these single events that are really cool, but, like we need, we just need a lot more of them. And it’s tough because like, like even for me, like, this is, this is, I would love to go do that, but like, that’s, that’s a whole lot to go invest in and do in terms of like time and like stepping away from other stuff as well. Whereas it would make a lot of sense to like,

Dizzy Skips (1:04:06)
Yeah. Sure.

Nate KG (1:04:10)
have multiple across, kind of like concerts, right? You got like the tour that happens all over the place, but it’d be nice if it was very consistent. People could kind of look forward to it and kind of plan around it versus it being like a vacation every time. Like a vacation happens occasionally and you really have to plan for that usually, unless it’s like, local, but like you still really have to plan for that. How can we make it more of a

Dizzy Skips (1:04:14)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Right.

Nate KG (1:04:37)
permanent thing. How can it be an all? And you get this in some, in some communities, like, in Canada, you’ve got some communities that it’s a solid group of people that hang out a lot. And I’m obviously like in London or, know, in England, there’s a really solid community of people who tend to like get together and meet up. there’s some jumpers in LA, but, the meetups I think are not too, too plentiful. we’ve done.

Dizzy Skips (1:04:41)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:05:05)
workshops before, like it takes so much to put those on, you know? So like, so like you’ve got, so you’ve got like someone like Chris who’s, planned his entire year of his business around having meetups, right? Because he’s decided that that’s something that he wants to do, right? Which is great. The amount of like work and intensity and resources that goes into that is, is insane. And so, which is awesome, but like, how do we make it?

Dizzy Skips (1:05:09)
Yeah.

Nate KG (1:05:32)
how do we make that something that is easier to duplicate? Or like a process that can be kind of copied and pasted, you know? So, I don’t know if that really answers your question, but there you go.

Dizzy Skips (1:05:36)
Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, so

you don’t currently have any meetups or in-person workshops planned?

Nate KG (1:05:49)
No, I don’t have any. I don’t have any planned. I’ve done some in the past. I will do more for sure in the future. I just don’t have like an actual date planned. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:05:54)
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Are you going to London for that meetup?

Nate KG (1:06:00)
I don’t plan to right now because of, yeah, cause it’s that, you know, stepping away from a bunch of other stuff too, which is pretty challenging. A little bit. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Time change and everything.

Dizzy Skips (1:06:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a little bit of a commute too.

Yeah. Well, man, Nate, I just really appreciate you coming on and talking to me. guess, we’ve, we’ve covered all sorts of advice, but you know, for somebody who is maybe listening in and thinking, I’d like to get started with jump rope. I’m not really sure if it’s for me or whatever, but, but it looks really cool. What advice do you have for them?

Nate KG (1:06:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

The looking really cool is enough as it is. It really is because like the, once you see something that is interesting, you don’t need to know what it is. You just need to start and kind of work through it. And that’s where obviously a lot of stuff online for free, including my stuff. I’ve tried to make it for that reason. Other stuff is also really good.

Dizzy Skips (1:06:36)
Hahaha.

Nate KG (1:06:59)
and just have to keep going because every single jumper I’ve ever talked to, all of them, zero exception, has said to me, I’m doing skills that I never thought that I could do. Whether they’ve worked with me or not, they end up doing that. The reason is, the truth about jump rope is, so much of the stuff you see is really attainable. As long as you’re physically capable of 20 to 30 jumps as a beginning point.

Dizzy Skips (1:07:09)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:07:23)
Not in a row, not without a mistake, but like you just, your body can jump 20 to 30 times, right? You’ve got access to getting a jump rope and you can like get access to these videos. If you’ve got that, like you’re going to be able to figure it out. You just have to stick with it and then conquer whatever internal stuff comes along the way. Jump rope will pull in front of you, all of the internal stuff that you are thinking about every day, whether good or bad. So you have to be ready for that and be ready to kind of, just keep moving forward and just.

Dizzy Skips (1:07:46)
Yeah.

Nate KG (1:07:51)
understand that it’s not about comparing yourself to others. It’s about recognizing that if all these people have done it, then you can do it too. The time is irrelevant. It will happen. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:08:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I talked to Kathy Jumps the other week and she has the three P’s, the patience, perseverance and practice. And to me, that’s everything for jump rope. It’s like 99 % of the difficulty is showing up. And once you show up and practice, you will get better, right?

Nate KG (1:08:07)
Nice.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

To be honest with you, kind of might disagree a little bit. I feel like the showing up is actually kind of fun. Because you’re like, let’s get in there. It’s once you get there, it’s what do I do? How do I do it? Am I even doing this correctly? And I think to me, that’s where the education part is so important because I think that if I could just like magic button, click it, and you just knew what I knew right now. I could just transplant everything immediately to your head.

Dizzy Skips (1:08:26)
Okay.

Yeah.

You sure? Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (1:08:50)
in the next three months, you’d like, you would literally like be unrecognizable because like all the information is there. It’s just a matter of doing it. Right. And you might still be missing like the way certain things feel, but you’d be like, I got it. I know how to approach this. That’s what I want to pass on is like all that. Like if you, if you actually get an idea of like what to do and like how to adjust your practice, that’s, that’s when you kind of get out of your own way and move forward. You know, the, not showing up, think happens when

Dizzy Skips (1:08:58)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nate KG (1:09:19)
all the negative stuff takes over. So like when you start thinking about how so-and-so is doing better than you or how so-and-so skills look good or how your reps aren’t as perfect as they should be or how you’re just going so slowly, like you just find, like people just find like a million different ways to like prove, not really prove, but like think that they’re just not doing things right. And it’s like, but those aren’t even actually rooted in anything real, you know? And so I think,

Dizzy Skips (1:09:21)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nate KG (1:09:48)
I think that’s kind of like, if you really understand that piece of things, it gets a lot easier to keep showing up because you’re not fighting yourself by going there. Cause if you, cause if you’re talking trash to yourself, every time you go jump rope, you’re not going to want to go jump rope, especially when you’re getting whipped all the time too. It’s like not a nice feedback loop. So yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:09:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, it’s not.

No, I noticed, you know, sometimes in the beginning I had some pretty negative self-talk when I would trip up or whatever like, come on, dummy, you can do this better than that. and I quickly got out of that because I realized, first of all, it doesn’t help anything. Like it, it never helps to have that negative self-talk.

Nate KG (1:10:23)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (1:10:27)
and to sort of switch the paradigm into, hey, I’m here and I’m trying and I’m making mistakes and I can make mistakes because that’s part of getting better made a lot of difference for me.

Nate KG (1:10:34)
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. And also into, we were to get a little more granular on that too, with the mistakes, if you know what the mistake is, more or less, my hand is too high in a cross. I’m not using, my wrists are literally stuck and they are not moving. That’s actually valuable. So again, splitting it apart and not going from, I’ve never done a toad cross to I need to do this a hundred out of a hundred times go from

Dizzy Skips (1:10:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah.

Nate KG (1:11:03)
I’ve never done a toad cross. So what exactly is a toad cross? And like figuring out what those hand positions are. Okay, cool. Now I got that level. Okay, I’m trying it, but something’s weird. What’s going on? My foot is really high from the floor. I wonder why. I should probably jump lower. Okay, well this is hard. Maybe I should wait a little bit longer. Like just working through like, okay, well I’ve identified this piece. Let me work with this piece, right? Because it’s a lot.

Dizzy Skips (1:11:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nate KG (1:11:30)
hard to build a house. It is very easy to nail a piece of wood to another piece of wood. Right. And so if you just get real specific about stuff and it sounds like this is kind of how you’ve approached things, like it makes it a lot, a lot more enjoyable because again, that’s what we’re here for. Just to hang out and have fun in the first place. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:11:35)
Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And

that to speak to what you’re saying there, like this is why your videos are so amazing to me because you have been through that. You have thought through all of those little things and you illustrate them so clearly in your videos. not just with your words, because I don’t think you talk too much. I, I enjoy it, but, but the quality of your videos, again, the, different angles, the slow mo, it really, like I can’t recommend your

Nate KG (1:12:07)
I’m glad.

Mm-hmm.

Dizzy Skips (1:12:17)
training highly enough. And to anybody who’s listening to this, if you guys don’t know Nate KG, go subscribe now to like his Instagram and his YouTube and sign up for his free programs, pay him to be your coach because you will get better. There we go. Yeah. Nate.

Nate KG (1:12:18)
Thank you, I appreciate that.

Hahaha

There’s the plug. Yeah, that’s funny. No, it’s I appreciate

that. It’s it’s definitely it’s a lot of fun. So.

Dizzy Skips (1:12:37)
Yeah, yeah. Jump rope is like the most fun thing I’ve done as an adult. I just, I can’t get enough of it, right?

Nate KG (1:12:43)
It’s crazy.

I, so not to, not to drag this out too. I know like we’re kind of coming up on time, but I just want to point out like for me growing up, it was me and other kids jump roping. Every adult would be like, it’s that’s nice. Like they would grab a rope and go like, look at me. I’m like the kids two jumps. Okay. Go back to it. Kids, you know, are like, but the only exception I saw was like this woman at the gym that I used to train at very, very early on who would do 10 minutes of jump rope nonstop.

Dizzy Skips (1:12:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nate KG (1:13:11)
That was the only person I ever saw doing jump rope and she must’ve been like a boxer or a fighter or like something. And that was it. And now I spent all my time talking to adults who pick up a jump rope. They do skills and they have the exact same responses as kids. It’s so it’s, it’s like, it blows my mind. So yeah. Well, I, so like as a kid, like my team, we had a lot of fun, you know, but after a certain point, like

Dizzy Skips (1:13:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s got to feel super rewarding, right?

Nate KG (1:13:40)
kind of people started to just kind of drop off. had their interest. It was great. And they kind of moved on, which is very common with kids in sports for sure. And I was like, I’m just getting started. And my friends, I love my friends. Like everything’s cool. I didn’t have a whole lot of folks to talk about jump rope. And so I feel like now I just talk about jump rope all the time. And it’s like really satisfying because all this stuff that I’ve nerded out on for years and years and years is like, that’s my life. And so it’s really fun. Yeah.

Dizzy Skips (1:13:47)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it’s awesome to do what you love, right? Yeah.

Well, Nate, thank you again for coming on and talking to me. This has been super fun and thank you for everything you do for the community, for putting out such great content. Just love it.

Nate KG (1:14:18)
Fisher.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. This was a, this was really fun chatting with you.

Dizzy Skips (1:14:24)
Yeah, my pleasure, man.