How many jump rope tricks are there?
The beautiful thing about jump rope is how much creativity there is in all the possible skills and styles. It’s truly endless. But how many skills are there? The answer might surprise you.
The best place to start is with the backbone of all jump rope: crosses and swings. There are nine hand placements that any cross or swing can be made with. This means there are only 81 possible crosses and swings (9 x 9) if we count both sides. If we ignore the symmetry, there are only roughly 40 unique crosses or swings. Doesn’t sound like much? This is where things get interesting.
If we ignore the difficulty of any given skill, then we can theoretically perform a Mic Release, a Floater, a Stall, a 180 Turn and a Wrap in almost any cross or swing position. That’s an additional 200 possible skills (5 x 40).
Things get tricky once we consider multiple unders since every skill in our original 40 crosses and swings cannot be combined to make a valid double under. So let’s make some assumptions for the sake of argument. Let’s assume any skill can be performed as the first under, last under or both (consecutively). This gives us 120 possible double unders. Crazy right? If we include triple unders with these assumptions then we can have an additional 240 triple unders (first, last, middle, or any combination thereof).
When performing footwork, there are 10 unique places you can put one foot around your body. When considering the feet together, across all bilateral and unilateral footwork skills, there are only 30 unique single-count footwork skills for one side. We are not considering combos here.
You’ll notice we haven’t combined multiple unders or footwork with any other type of rope manipulation. This is important, since layering skills like this is ‘skill addition’ and doesn’t answer our question since technically any skill can be performed as a multiple under. The same applies to footwork.
So far, our running total is 630 possible skills.
If we now include the ‘other’ side and do each skill backwards this total jumps (pardon the pun) up to 2,520. The assumptions we’ve made along the way have produced a very conservative number, despite still being huge.