Punk Rope creator, Tim Haft, 47, has his company's logo tattooed on his left shoulder as a constant reminder of his mission: to eradicate the sedentary living epidemic by showing non-exercisers that the pursuit of fitness can be fun.
Haft’s Punk Rope class, which is offered at YMCAs, JCCs, health clubs, college recreation centers, and schools, is a playful and raucous cross between recess and boot camp. Wanting to share his unorthodox approach to fitness with a larger audience, a DVD seemed to be the ticket, so Punk Rope, Inc. released: Never Mind Aerobics Here's Punk Rope.
The DVD, which includes a music CD, features a 33-minute workout consisting of 14 intervals (total running time is around 50 minutes). From the opening scene, the viewer gets a sense that this DVD will be unlike any other in the fitness genre. It is, after all, filmed at a bar—Coco 66 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. After two warm-ups, Haft leads the viewer through alternate bouts of rope jumping and unorthodox conditioning drills and wraps things up with a core training segment and a cooldown.
The 23 cast members are all students in Haft's Punk Rope classes. They range in age from 20 to forty-something and vary widely in terms of body type and fitness level. Haft believes that it's important for viewers to be able to see "themselves" in a workout DVD. "If you pop in a workout video and all you see are super-fit and trim fitness models, for most of us that can be an alienating experience. While we may not say it out loud, what we're thinking is, "No matter what I do I'm probably never going to look like that."
The tone throughout the DVD is lighthearted with the emphasis on fun and fantasy. In "Hut, Hut, Hike" Haft and his teammates perform a variety of football-based moves such as fast feet, the 3-point stance, and quarterback squats while the Ducky Boys blast through "Boston USA" in the background.
In "V8 Nightmare," we follow three temptresses who are terrorized by a "monster" with hairy palms. To get away, they perform a series of reverse lunges and mountain climbers. And finally in "It's a Dog's Life," the cast pretends to be canines while doing "fire hydrants," quadruped, and "frisbee jumps" to the buzzsaw guitars of "Live This Life" by the Queers.
While the drills are all playful in nature, don't let that fool you into thinking that the workout will be a walk in the park. Haft points out that participants can expect to accrue a number of fitness benefits from regularly participating in a Punk Rope workout. These include improved body composition, bone density, aerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, coordination, balance, and timing. Research shows that rope jumping at 145 revolutions per minute, which Haft considers a moderate pace, burns as many calories as running at an 8-minute-per-mile pace.
The DVD soundtrack features 17 songs by 12 bands from 6 countries (US, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Denmark). Stiff Little Fingers, the Bouncing Souls, the Queers, and the Fleshtones are perhaps the most recognizable of the lot, but all of the bands that contributed to the project have significant followings. The best-known song on the DVD is undoubtedly the punk classic, Suspect Device, which Stiff Little Fingers originally recorded in 1979. The live version that appears on the DVD was recorded on March 17, 2006 at Barrowland in Glasgow.
Never Mind Aerobics Here's Punk Rope is available now on Amazon.com.
I was shuffling along putting stuff away from my old office. The typical inner dialogue was playing, "why did I keep this?", "I really SHOULD do something with this", "why didn't I ever 'go anywhere' with this idea?" All judgement-based thoughts.
I came across my see-through shoe box of scarves that I was planning to make a project out of "some day" and then I saw Fenix, my cat, with that wild look on his face like he wanted to play. I couldn't find his tiger tail toy so I just got a scarf out of the shoebox and told Fenix to make his mark on it. Heck, rip it to shreds if you want to. That way, if I ever do make a project out of it, there will be an even cooler story behind it. Plus, Fenix could care less if its the tiger tail from the pet store or a scarf. He just wants to play.
Punk Rope creator, Tim Haft, 47, has his company's logo tattooed on his left shoulder as a constant reminder of his mission: to eradicate the sedentary living epidemic by showing non-exercisers that the pursuit of fitness can be fun.
Haft’s Punk Rope class, which is offered at YMCAs, JCCs, health clubs, college recreation centers, and schools, is a playful and raucous cross between recess and boot camp. Wanting to share his unorthodox approach to fitness with a larger audience, a DVD seemed to be the ticket, so Punk Rope, Inc. released: Never Mind Aerobics Here's Punk Rope.
The DVD, which includes a music CD, features a 33-minute workout consisting of 14 intervals (total running time is around 50 minutes). From the opening scene, the viewer gets a sense that this DVD will be unlike any other in the fitness genre. It is, after all, filmed at a bar—Coco 66 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. After two warm-ups, Haft leads the viewer through alternate bouts of rope jumping and unorthodox conditioning drills and wraps things up with a core training segment and a cooldown.
The 23 cast members are all students in Haft's Punk Rope classes. They range in age from 20 to forty-something and vary widely in terms of body type and fitness level. Haft believes that it's important for viewers to be able to see "themselves" in a workout DVD. "If you pop in a workout video and all you see are super-fit and trim fitness models, for most of us that can be an alienating experience. While we may not say it out loud, what we're thinking is, "No matter what I do I'm probably never going to look like that."
The tone throughout the DVD is lighthearted with the emphasis on fun and fantasy. In "Hut, Hut, Hike" Haft and his teammates perform a variety of football-based moves such as fast feet, the 3-point stance, and quarterback squats while the Ducky Boys blast through "Boston USA" in the background.
In "V8 Nightmare," we follow three temptresses who are terrorized by a "monster" with hairy palms. To get away, they perform a series of reverse lunges and mountain climbers. And finally in "It's a Dog's Life," the cast pretends to be canines while doing "fire hydrants," quadruped, and "frisbee jumps" to the buzzsaw guitars of "Live This Life" by the Queers.
