Tricking

Tricking is a relatively new underground sport that emerged from sports karate tournaments. It involves martial arts kicking, twisting, and flipping in a creative, flowy way. Trickers combine moves such as aerials, backflips, gainers, and various kicks and into combos that are really cool to watch. In essence, trickers are modern day ninjas. Many have experience in martial arts styles such as karate, taekwondo, wushu, capeoira, kung fu or gymnastics and tumbling though many excel without any previous experience. Some extremely skilled trickers include Anis Cheurfa, Michael Guthrie, Vellu Saarela, Scott Skelton, and Jeremy Marinas to name a few.

I have been doing Taekwondo since I was seven years old and recently became interested in tricking in late 2008. In 2009, I took some tumbling classes, joined my karate school's demo team, and started learning a few tricks from my taekwondo instructor. I don't have much time to practice very often so I'm not that good, but tricking is something I want to pursue. This sport is definitely becoming more mainstream as shown in a number of commercials and videos, for example Chris Brown's 'Yeah' music video. Trickers push the supposed limits of gravity and physics with what they do. I recommend checking it out on Youtube.