From KERA News:
There’s a lot to gawk at at the State Fair of Texas. A 55-foot tall cowboy, towering cones of cotton candy, flashing midway rides that defy gravity. This year, a handful of guys on pogo sticks do that too.
Three times a day, the Xpogo demo team does everything from back flips to 7-foot bounds over a limbo pole. It looks cool, sure. The biomechanical breakdown of what these athletes are actually doing is even cooler.
Defying Gravity On Pogo Sticks
The Xpogo athletes can pull off tricks most of us would never attempt. Jumps with no hands, jumps with no feet. Black flips, front flips and sky-high leaps over obstacles.
Bryan Pognant has been involved in extreme pogo-sticking for 15 years. He says the key to getting tricks down isn’t strength, it’s…
“Balance, always balance,” he says. “We have 13-year-olds jumping like 10 feet, and that’s only because they know how to balance.”
Watch Pognant perform a trick called the ‘no foot peg grab’ with scientific analysis from SMU professor of physiology and biomechanics Peter Weyand:
