Jump Rope Log: Santiago #02 — Progress is Asymmetrical and Nonlinear

May 7

May 7 Jump Rope Log: Santiago #02 — Progress is Asymmetrical and Nonlinear

This is part of my Jump Rope Logs, a series about keeping a portable practice across places. You can read the full reflection here.

I’ve been keeping up my practice in the same padded playground in my Santiago Airbnb building. It’s still a near-ideal setup: right downstairs, quiet in the mornings, and soft enough that my shins are not too mad at me. But this is my last week in the building, so the setup has an expiration date. Soon I’ll have to find a new spot and adapt again.

For now though, the bigger challenge is within the practice itself. I’m still progressing, but the skills are getting more complex, which means progress feels slower, messier, and less predictable.

There’s also a small travel-specific limitation: I keep wishing I had my beaded rope so I could start learning releases. Supposedly it’s easier to learn those with a heavier rope than with PVC, but I didn’t pack it. So for now, I’m working with what I have.

Location:

Santiago — padded playground in apartment building, mornings

Practice:

~50 min sessions (~20 min active jumping), ~2500 jumps per session, 3x/week.
Finally getting more consistent with crossovers
Slowly practicing arm skills: EB swings, side swing to crossovers, basic stalls
Improving double-unders, but still feel like I’m not quite getting it
Learning more complex footwork
Improving continuous jumps to around 150–200

Rope:

Dope Ropes 5mm PVC (Day ~26)
Rubber playground surface. Still the same slight center fray and rubbing, but I’ve noticed a bit more tangling (not sure if from rope wear itself or from practicing more swing-based skills).

Shift:

I had a good stretch where progress felt fast. Now that I’m learning more complex skills, progress feels slower — not because I’m getting worse, but because each skill takes longer to understand, coordinate, and make consistent.

Notes:

A couple of meta-learning lessons have been coming up recently.

First: progress is asymmetrical. Footwork comes much more naturally to me than arm skills, and my right side clearly understands movements faster than my left. Crossovers, for example, feel much easier when my right arm goes on top. Both make sense: I usually feel stronger in my legs than in my arms, and I’m right-handed. But jump rope makes those asymmetries much more obvious. I’m trying to think of it as a chance to balance out my sides and train the weaker patterns.

Second: progress is nonlinear. Some skills click suddenly after several slow sessions, like crossovers did. But the reverse can also happen: a skill can seem to click, then disappear again. My EB swings did that recently. I thought I had learned them, but then in one session, I suddenly couldn’t do them anymore. I had to slow everything down and rebuild the movement step by step.

I’m starting to understand that this is probably part of the process. A skill can click before it stabilizes. One good session does not mean I own it yet, and one bad session does not mean I’ve lost it.

So the lesson this time is to trust the uneven parts of practice. Progress is asymmetrical and nonlinear, but it is still progress.

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