This post and the next one in this series both get “deep in the weeds” fairly quickly, and will present a bunch of seemingly irrelevant details, but the significance of those details will become apparent in the third, fourth, and fifth section of this series, and will provide a fairly complete view of not only my “Circle” model, but also provide a very solid foundation to explore Anthony DeLongis’s “Rolling Loop” system and Senior Grand Master Ron Lew’s “Tibetan Wave” style of Filipino Whip Martial Arts.
I recently saw a video on YouTube that the amazing whip maker Steve Townsend had made in 2019 about the natural “Coil” of a well-made whip and how essential it is to whip artistry. I have no idea how I missed it until now, as it’s the very sort of thing I generally “Geek out” over, and try to distribute and share when I get the chance, (like now in this post where I provide the link,) and it’s not as though, like so many, I haven’t spent large swaths of 2020 searching for “The End of the Internet”. Regardless of how it slipped through the cracks, I’ve seen it now thanks to my friend and mentor, Anthony DeLongis.
Steve refers to Anthony quite often in the video, and Anthony shared it to his own Facebook page and expanded a bit on the topic that Steve presented. I myself wanted to comment with the following, which would have taken up considerably more bandwidth than Anthony’s original post.
I already have a very bad habit of making huge “Info Dump” comments on people’s walls, and I was trying to refrain because it’s incredibly rude. One shouldn’t just walk into someone’s living room and insert oneself into the conversation with a 40-minute lecture complete with a Powerpoint presentation and handouts. But I had a lot I wanted to say about it, so I decided I should use my own damned blog on my own damned website instead. It was this video that really inspired me to finally share my thoughts...As tedious and mired in details as they may be, over the next few essays in this series.
With all that said, please begin by viewing Steve Townsend’s video, linked above before proceeding because it provides an excellent framework for what I’m going to discuss.
Let’s begin with expanding a bit on what Steve was discussing about the natural “Coil” present in all well-made whips like those he makes.
We’ll kick that off by looking at why that curve even exists in the first place.
Around 2009-2010, I asked a couple of my favorite whip makers what caused the curve that Steve is referring to. The following is in essence what I got from them then, and from the conversations with OTHER whip makers and enthusiasts that those initial questions eleven or twelve years ago sparked. Also, please bear in mind that I myself AM NOT a whip maker, but I spend a lot of time in discussion with them, in far more granular detail than what I have attempted to condense below. So, the opinion and mileage of others may vary.
There are a number of factors that seem to contribute to the natural curvature of a whip, but a lot of it has to do with the nature of how whip makers braid their whips.
Fine whips of the type that we are discussing here, (the type I use, and the type that Steve Townsend makes,) regardless if they are made of nylon or leather, are composed of several layers of material. There is a plethora of information available online about this, and you can read more about it in the Supersonic Whips section of my website, and I also recommend my old friend Paul Nolan’s website for some insight as to the construction of well-crafted whips. The video of the time-lapsed construction of an Indy whip and Paul’s amazing commentary will provide a bit more illumination for what I’m going to talk about.
Many fine traditional whip makers of the “Australian construction” style - Steve Townsend and Paul Nolan included - braid from a hook. As they braid their way down the length of the thong, they step further away from the hook. While the whip maker does pull each strand very tightly, the flexible thong being constructed sags in the middle, so there is a curve being subtly imprinted on it as it is braided.
Now, as Paul’s description at Midwest Whips mentions, as each layer is completed, the whip is rolled flat between two slabs of wood or marble to smooth out the tension in the plaiting and get everything to even out to promote a nice smooth taper.
BUT that curvature, minute that it might be, is still present because one way or another, the way the whip is plaited, the strands are ever so slightly shorter on the INSIDE of the curve than they are on the OUTSIDE of the curve..
That may sound odd but consider this. The INSIDE-FACING curve of the whip is very much like driving in the INSIDE LANE of a race track. Because you are traveling in a circle of a smaller diameter, the perimeter of that circle is shorter. Consequently, you’re traveling less distance than you would by driving on the OUTSIDE lanes, (or the strands on the OUTER-FACING CURVE of the whip.) Therefore the strands are slightly shorter INSIDE the curve. So, even when the whipmaker is pulling equally tight on all strands on all sides, the whip has a tendency to curve back under in that direction.
As the diameter and length of the whip is built up with each consecutive layer, that VERY subtle curve that’s being braided into the whip is reinforced, (each layer is built up over the last one with the whip “sags” in braiding, falling into the same alignment as it had over the previous layer.
AGAIN, this curve that is being “reinforced” over consecutive layers does not seem significant. I’ve had both whip makers and whip performers I know and greatly respect tell me that the curve the braiding process imparts to a whip is negligible, and as I said I am not a whip maker myself. BUT consider this: Many whipmakers who have limited space to work in, or are making whips of 12-15 feet and longer often choose to braid from a vice rather than a hook. With a vice, the whip maker is typically braiding short sections at a time, and then moving the whip further down the length on the vice...So, the whip is curving in a convex orientation rather than a concave “sagging” one that results in braiding from a hook. Every whipmaker I have spoken to about this has mentioned that the “braiding seam” that is on top DURING braiding from a vice ends up on the OUTSIDE curve of their whip, and ends up on the INSIDE curve of the whip when brading from a hook. So, I cannot dismiss the notion that those subtle patterns built into it consistently over the length of the whip do not manifest. As Anthony DeLongis says and we will repeatedly demonstrate in the following discussions, the whip amplifies EVERY SUBTLE MOTION that the user puts into it. That extends not only to cracking them but also in making them, and many excellent whipmakers see the necessity and value of this natural curve and often use braiding and construction techniques to promote its development and effect, aligning all bolsters, braided layers, and binding to follow this curve.
Regardless of how it gets there, a fine whip should display a natural curve. This imparts to the whip an internal structure that is analogous to a living creature like a snake, (remember that. We’re going to come back to that again and again in this post, and in future missives on this blog.) As Steve points out in the above video, you can look at that outer edge of the curve as a “backbone” or “spine” of the whip, and conversely the inner curve can be compared to the “Belly” or “underside” of our whip.
Before we go any further, I have a confession and a VERY brief rant. I have long balked at calling that inner curve “Underside” the “Belly” because I think it can be confusing. One of my biggest pet peeves in the whip community, in general, is inconsistency. If you ask one person what a “Cattleman’s Crack” is, they MAY show you what I would have once called a “Circus Crack”, or they might show you an “Overhead Crack.” Ask about a “Fast Figure 8,” and you may see a “Circus Crack” and a “Reverse Circus Crack” combo, or you may see a “Volley.” It depends on who you ask.
Whip “Tricks” have all sorts of names; the “Tasmanian Cutback”, “The Queensland Flash,” the “Fargo Flash”, the “Coachman’s Crack”...The list goes on and on. ALL of those tricks are made up of ONLY two moves. I’ve talked to budding whip crackers who have said “I can do X and Y, but I can’t do Z…” (insert whatever whip trick you like...As I say, they’re pretty interchangeable,) And I’ve pointed out that Z is nothing but X at a different angle, or on a different side of the body and when I demonstrate and they try it, the look on their face is like I’d just shared some great answer to the universe with them.
Those two moves are just arranged in different orders and performed in different planes to produce those “Tricks.” In fact, I think that the greatest of the many contributions that Anthony DeLongis’s “Rolling Loop” system has made to the art of whip cracking is codifying the angles, planes of motion, and musculoskeletal actions of cracking the whip into a standardized terminology. With it, we’re all on the same page with what we’re talking about. A “Cattleman’s Crack” may be referring to either a “Circus Crack” or an “Overhead Crack”, but a Compound Vertical Forehand reduces all uncertainty in the discussion, (as long as you have studied Rolling Loop, but more on that at a later date with a more detailed analysis of Anthony’s system in Part 4 of this series.)
So, what’s that got to do with calling the curve “Spine” and “Belly”?
Well, “Spine” works fine as far as I’m concerned. My issue WAS with “Belly.” The “Belly” of a whip to me is any of the braided layers beneath the “overlay” (the outer layer of the whip.)
For example, it would be common for you to find a description on a whip makers page that would describe an “Indiana Jones”-styled bullwhip’s construction as having “a 12-plait overlay with two braided bellies.” So, when someone refers to the inside curve of a whip thong as “the belly”, my brain interprets that as some layer of nylon or leather under the overlay, and I have to pause a moment to consider the context of the conversation to determine which it is. So, in my attempts to “reduce uncertainty” in terminology, (Master’s Degree in Communication, go figure,) I chose to use a more biological/medical terminology: The “Spine” side of the whip is the Dorsal side and the “Belly” side of the whip is the Ventral side.
Something else interesting about the terms “Dorsal” and “Ventral”; not only do they refer to the top and bottom surfaces of a whole organism, they can also refer to the top and bottom surfaces of an appendage of an organism. If you hold your arm out, palm down, nails up, the upper surface of your hand, featuring the nails, knuckles, etc. is the dorsal side of your hand. The palm side of your hand is the ventral side.
I’m going to spend a good amount of time from here on out defining the similarities between the structure and function of our hands and the structure and function of the whip. It is a useful analogy, (don’t make a “handy” joke, Dan, don’t make a “handy” joke!) as any motion or action we make with the whip we tend to describe with our dominant hand, and when holding the whip in our dominant hand, any motion we make is amplified and reflected down the length of the whip, (I will delve into this in GREAT detail in Parts 3 through 5 of this series of essays, as I discuss my “Circle” Model of whip handling, and the aforementioned DeLongis Rolling Loop and Tibetan Wave methods respectively.)
To continue the “hand” analogy to the whip, we can look at the structure of our hands. Our fingers are designed to bend in primarily one direction. They curl inward TOWARD the ventral. If you’ve studied human anatomy for either biology or art, you understand that our measurements, while they might vary, tend to loosely follow a natural ratio. Barring physical abnormalities and uncommon variation, if you take the length of the bone in the first joint of each finger, and add it to the length of the bone behind it in that finger, the sum of the two will be relatively equal to the 3rd bone of that finger. Find the sum of the lengths of the 2nd and 3rd bone, and that will be the relative length of the corresponding metacarpal bone. You can do this for all the fingers, all the toes, and any illustrator or sculptor knows how big one should make a normal-sized torso in relation to the height of the head. This “Divine Proportion” or “Golden Ratio” is a pattern that turns up everywhere in nature: snail shells, pine cones, proportions to human anatomy, etc. Italian artist, philosopher, scientist, and father of the European Renaissance, Leonardo DaVinci, illustrated this in his famous “Vitruvian Man” drawing and is often rendered in the famous “Golden Spiral” illustration that spiraling coils that a well made with will naturally curl into when laid flat, (More on that later.)
For a much better illustration of how this works, I recommend checking out Jeff Grant's great section on the Science Friday website about the Fibonacci Sequence in nature (and EXPECIALLY check out that animated GIF in Exercise 1 titled A model of the Fibonacci Sequence unrolling, and note how that roll out EXACTLY models the unrolling of the whip Steve Townsend demonstrates in the video posted above.)
As stated, fingers are really only meant to bend inward toward the palm. You can stretch them, backward to a degree. In fact, you probably should when preparing for an exercise involving your hands like sports, yoga, martial arts, or playing a musical instrument, but one has to be careful not to hyperextend them. The whip works exactly like this as well, and repeated stress to any whip being forced to hyperextend - flex BACKWARD against the natural curve - will damage the whip, possibly beyond repair just as surely as if you were to bend your index finger back to touch your forearm. Now, flexibility is a relative thing. Bending backward along the dorsal orientation for fingers CAN, as stated, be beneficial for warm-up purposes, and an individual’s flexibility can be increased with controlled practice...and there is a medical condition known as hypermobility in which people can often flex their fingers and even spine’s backward almost double, (often called “Double jointed”) The amount of natural flex a well-made whip will exhibit will vary from maker to maker and whip to whip, depending on the design and purpose that whip was crafted for.
This brings us to the biggest apparent difference in the Wild West Arts community’s traditional approach to whip cracking and the Rolling Loop system that Anthony DeLongis developed. That “curve-up” vs “curve-down” approach. Again, there are a number of different ways people describe this. I’ve heard “With Bias” for ventral-side-up and “Against Bias” for dorsal-side-up. I’ve heard “Natural” for ventral-side-up and “Inverted” for dorsal-side up and I’ve heard “Right way round” for the curve-down and “that damned-upside-down-thing-DeLongis-does” for curve-up.
These terms can be misleading and all display some bias because if I say “Inverted,” that implies that there is some natural state that has been reversed when both orientations are perfectly acceptable and useful depending on individual goals and approach. Proponents of the DeLongis method refer to “inverted” as a curve-down orientation, and proponents of the more traditional “Wild West” approach refer to “inverted” as the curve-up orientation the DeLongis method utilizes.
To speak about things in more inclusive way, I again decided to refer back to anatomical and physiological terminology. If you hold your hand palm-down, nails-up so that the dorsal side is oriented upward, then your hand is pronated. If you hold your hand palm-up, nails-down so that the ventral side is oriented upward, then your hand is supinated, (the easy mnemonic device I was taught to remember this is when the palm is up like you’re holding a platter, it’s like you’re “serving soup,” so it’s soup-inated.) The same holds true if you are laying on your back, you are supine...if you’re “prone” on the ground, you’re face-down. So, carrying on the physiology analogy, I refer to Wild West Arts “Traditional” dorsal-side-up orientation as “pronated” and the “DeLongis Rolling Loop” orientation as “supinated”. We will discuss the exploration of these orientations in Part Three of this series.
Another analogy we can draw between the whip and the hand is about compositional structure. Whips are made up of layers of tightly stretched, carefully woven, fibrous materials that stretch and contract with motion much like muscle tissue on the frame of the human body. Like the hand, those tightly-plaited strands of nylon or leather on the VENTRAL side of the whip, (the inner curve,) give it the preference to curl under, just like the flexor tendons on the ventral side of hand. The strands on the DORSAL side of the whip, (the outer edge of the curve,) tend to allow the whip to extend out straight, just like the extensor tendons on the dorsal side of the hand, (I first noted this similarity during my forced study of human anatomy and the musculoskeletal system during my wife’s - then fiance’s - preparation to take the Ohio state medical board exam to become a licensed massage therapist.)
Flexor tendons are designed to contract and pull. They are the tendons and muscles that allow you to close your hand and grasp objects and are the tendons that are used when you flex your bicep muscles. They are, in general, designed for more strength and power than their corresponding extensor tendons, which, as the name implies are designed to extend and expand. When you open your hand or straighten your arm below the elbow, (using the tricep muscles,) you’re using extensor tendons. Unless you focus exercise on VERY specific muscle groups, your bicep muscles are probably stronger than your tricep muscles. You can oppose more resistance with your biceps than with your triceps. These are foundational kinesthetic concepts that are applied every day in professional sports coaching and martial arts techniques, and the pertinence of this will become more apparent as we discuss how this orientation affects how the whip cracks in Part 3, and the utilization of this phenomenon to provide an extra margin of safety in stunt work and dramatic violence in the discussion of DeLongis Rolling Loop in Part Four.
In summary, the points from this post that you should be familiar with are:
- The construction of the whip mirrors that of a living organism.
- You can draw a direct comparison to the structure of a well-made whip and your own musculoskeletal structure.
- The whip has a dorsal side, and a ventral side, and...
- When cracking the whip, you can describe its orientation as either pronated or supinated.
That may seem like a whole lot of information above to just detail those four points, but the detail will come in handy in Part Three, coming next week. I promise.