I was listening to a Huberman Lab episode featuring Stuart McMillan, a movement coach who works with elite sprinters. The conversation was mostly about speed and athleticism, but one small detail stuck with me: skipping — the thing you did at recess — turns out to be a genuinely excellent exercise for adults. It’s easier on the body than sprinting, highly effective, and scaleable.
Andrew Huberman asked the obvious follow-up question: what do you call it so it doesn’t sound ridiculous? He’s done this before — he popularized “non-sleep deep rest” as a more clinical-sounding name for yoga nidra. McMillan offered “plyometrics,” which is accurate but pretty broad. Box jumps, burpees, squat jumps — they’re all plyometrics. The word doesn’t capture what makes skipping specifically interesting.
Which got me thinking about names.
The word “plyometrics” itself isn’t exactly poetic. Fred Wilt, a former US Olympic distance runner, coined it after noticing Soviet athletes doing a lot of jumping and bounding during their warm-ups while American athletes were stretching. He combined the Greek words for “more” and “measure.” Even he acknowledged it wasn’t a great name. It stuck anyway.
So what’s a better name for skipping specifically? I started pulling it apart. What actually makes skipping distinct?
- There’s a wave-like quality to it — your body rises and falls rhythmically as you move forward. That’s the undulatory part.
- You alternate legs with each bound. Alternating leg.
- It’s a jump-based movement. Plyometric jump.
Put it together: undulatory alternating leg plyometric jumps.
It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it earns every word. It describes the motion accurately, it sounds like something an athlete would say, and it sidesteps the “wait, are you talking about recess?” problem entirely.
The exercise itself is worth adding to your routine regardless of what you call it. It’s low-impact relative to sprinting, it trains single-leg power, and it has that rhythmic, full-body quality that makes it feel more like movement than a workout. Give it a try — just maybe wait until you’re away from people who would recognize it as skipping.
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