Xpogo LLC

Online Magazine article about Xpogo - Fitness First

Online Magazine article about Xpogo - Fitness First

Clip from Chinese Guinness Worlds Records TV Show on CCTV. - Guinness World Records Beijing (CCTV)

Clip from Chinese Guinness Worlds Records TV Show on CCTV. - Guinness World Records Beijing (CCTV)

(In Portuguese from Brazillian TV Show Domingão do Faustão)
Os Reis do Pulo agitaram o palco do Domingão com suas manobras com o equipamento chamado "Extreme Pogo Stick". A assistente de palco Carol Nakamura foi cobaia do grupo, chamado XPOGO, e não escondeu o medo:

"Não me arrepio assim há muito tempo", brincou ela.

XPOGO começou há 13 anos comatletas de diversas cidades dos EUA e aterrissou pela primeira vez na América do Sul. Já imaginou dar 10 saltos mortais consecutivos para trás? Assista aos vídeos! - Domingão do Faustão

(In Portuguese from Brazillian TV Show Domingão do Faustão)
Os Reis do Pulo agitaram o palco do Domingão com suas manobras com o equipamento chamado "Extreme Pogo Stick". A assistente de palco Carol Nakamura foi cobaia do grupo, chamado XPOGO, e não escondeu o medo:

"Não me arrepio assim há muito tempo", brincou ela.

XPOGO começou há 13 anos comatletas de diversas cidades dos EUA e aterrissou pela primeira vez na América do Sul. Já imaginou dar 10 saltos mortais consecutivos para trás? Assista aos vídeos! - Domingão do Faustão

TV Ad with Nike - Nike

TV Ad with Nike - Nike

Online Video - The Today Show

Online Video - The Today Show

The pogo stick may never upend the wheel as a means of locomotion. But as inventions go, they share something: Once built, there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could seem to do to improve the basic design. In the more than eight decades since a Russian immigrant named George B. Hansburg introduced the pogo stick to America, the device had scarcely changed: a homely stilt with foot pegs and a steel coil spring that bopped riders a few inches off the ground. And bopped. And bopped. And bopped. Some kids fell off so many times they gave up, tossing the pogo next to the dinged hula hoops and unicycle deep in the garage. Others just outgrew it, gaining enough weight as teenagers to snap the stick or snuff the spring.

But not long ago, three inventors—toiling at home, unaware of one another’s existence—set out to reimagine the pogo. What was so sacred about that ungainly steel coil? they wondered. Why couldn’t you make a pogo stick brawny enough for a 250-pound adult? And why not vault riders a few feet, instead of measly inches? If athletes were pulling “big air” on skateboards, snowboards and BMX bikes, why couldn’t the pogo stick be just as, well, gnarly?

When I reached one of the inventors, Bruce Middleton—who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and describes himself as an “outcast scientist”—he told me that the problem had been a “conceptual basin.”

“Normal people, someone tells them a pogo stick is a thing with steel springs, they go, ‘That’s right,’” Middleton said. “If that’s your basin, you’ll never come up with a very good pogo. An inventor is someone who recognizes the existence of a conceptual basin and sees that there’s a world outside the basin.”

That world turned out to be a perilous place. In their quest for Pogo 2.0, the inventors endured bouts of unconsciousness, defective Chinese imports, trips to the bank for second mortgages and an exploding prototype that sent one test pilot to the hospital for reconstructive surgery.

“It’s a really challenging thing if you think about the forces involved,” Middleton told me. He is talking, here, about forces that could fling a grown-up six feet in the air. “It’s a matter of life and death that it doesn’t break. So you’re taking on something that has to be built in a very serious way, and it has to come in on a kind of toy budget. And it has to be rugged enough that when people bail, and they’re four to five feet in air...it has to be rugged enough to take that. When you actually start thinking about what your design parameters are, it turns out it’s a horrific design challenge.”

In time, Middleton, along with two other inventors—a robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon University and a retired California firefighter—would see their ideas take wing. The Guinness Book of World Records would establish a new category—highest jump on a pogo stick—which a 17-year-old Canadian, Dan Mahoney, would set in 2010 by leaping, pogo and all, over a bar set at 9 feet 6 inches. Pogopalooza, an annual competition that started in 2004 with six guys in a church parking lot in Nebraska, graduated last year to a sports arena at the Orange County (California) fair. It drew thousands of fans and 50 of the world’s best practitioners of “extreme pogo.”

After one inventor’s son pogoed over a New York City taxicab on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” the host, looking uncharacteristically sincere, turned to the camera and said, “That’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in all my life—honest to God.”

But I hop ahead. Before Guinness and Letterman and the television lights, there were just three ordinary men, on lonely journeys, convinced that somewhere out there was a better pogo.

Ben Brown’s house is on a winding street in the Pittsburgh suburbs. When I?showed up, the 67-year-old robotics engineer answered the door in an ornately lettered sweatshirt that said, “I make stuff.”

A slight man with a stubbly gray beard and elfin features, Brown led me down a set of creaky stairs to his basement workshop. A smorgasbord of screws, wires and electronic capacitors filled rows of washed-out peanut butter jars that Brown had somehow affixed to the ceiling. In the world of robotics, one of his colleagues told me, Brown has a reputation as a “mechanical designer extraordinaire.”

“This is the graveyard,” Brown said, nodding at piles of wooden dowels, fiberglass strips and slotted aluminum shafts—detritus from the decade he’s spent refining his pogo stick, the BowGo. Razor, the company that rode the toy scooter to riches in the early 2000s, licensed Brown’s technology in 2010 and sells a children’s version of his stick, which they call the BoGo.

(See full article at link) - Smithsonian Magazine

The pogo stick may never upend the wheel as a means of locomotion. But as inventions go, they share something: Once built, there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could seem to do to improve the basic design. In the more than eight decades since a Russian immigrant named George B. Hansburg introduced the pogo stick to America, the device had scarcely changed: a homely stilt with foot pegs and a steel coil spring that bopped riders a few inches off the ground. And bopped. And bopped. And bopped. Some kids fell off so many times they gave up, tossing the pogo next to the dinged hula hoops and unicycle deep in the garage. Others just outgrew it, gaining enough weight as teenagers to snap the stick or snuff the spring.

But not long ago, three inventors—toiling at home, unaware of one another’s existence—set out to reimagine the pogo. What was so sacred about that ungainly steel coil? they wondered. Why couldn’t you make a pogo stick brawny enough for a 250-pound adult? And why not vault riders a few feet, instead of measly inches? If athletes were pulling “big air” on skateboards, snowboards and BMX bikes, why couldn’t the pogo stick be just as, well, gnarly?

When I reached one of the inventors, Bruce Middleton—who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and describes himself as an “outcast scientist”—he told me that the problem had been a “conceptual basin.”

“Normal people, someone tells them a pogo stick is a thing with steel springs, they go, ‘That’s right,’” Middleton said. “If that’s your basin, you’ll never come up with a very good pogo. An inventor is someone who recognizes the existence of a conceptual basin and sees that there’s a world outside the basin.”

That world turned out to be a perilous place. In their quest for Pogo 2.0, the inventors endured bouts of unconsciousness, defective Chinese imports, trips to the bank for second mortgages and an exploding prototype that sent one test pilot to the hospital for reconstructive surgery.

“It’s a really challenging thing if you think about the forces involved,” Middleton told me. He is talking, here, about forces that could fling a grown-up six feet in the air. “It’s a matter of life and death that it doesn’t break. So you’re taking on something that has to be built in a very serious way, and it has to come in on a kind of toy budget. And it has to be rugged enough that when people bail, and they’re four to five feet in air...it has to be rugged enough to take that. When you actually start thinking about what your design parameters are, it turns out it’s a horrific design challenge.”

In time, Middleton, along with two other inventors—a robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon University and a retired California firefighter—would see their ideas take wing. The Guinness Book of World Records would establish a new category—highest jump on a pogo stick—which a 17-year-old Canadian, Dan Mahoney, would set in 2010 by leaping, pogo and all, over a bar set at 9 feet 6 inches. Pogopalooza, an annual competition that started in 2004 with six guys in a church parking lot in Nebraska, graduated last year to a sports arena at the Orange County (California) fair. It drew thousands of fans and 50 of the world’s best practitioners of “extreme pogo.”

After one inventor’s son pogoed over a New York City taxicab on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” the host, looking uncharacteristically sincere, turned to the camera and said, “That’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in all my life—honest to God.”

But I hop ahead. Before Guinness and Letterman and the television lights, there were just three ordinary men, on lonely journeys, convinced that somewhere out there was a better pogo.

Ben Brown’s house is on a winding street in the Pittsburgh suburbs. When I?showed up, the 67-year-old robotics engineer answered the door in an ornately lettered sweatshirt that said, “I make stuff.”

A slight man with a stubbly gray beard and elfin features, Brown led me down a set of creaky stairs to his basement workshop. A smorgasbord of screws, wires and electronic capacitors filled rows of washed-out peanut butter jars that Brown had somehow affixed to the ceiling. In the world of robotics, one of his colleagues told me, Brown has a reputation as a “mechanical designer extraordinaire.”

“This is the graveyard,” Brown said, nodding at piles of wooden dowels, fiberglass strips and slotted aluminum shafts—detritus from the decade he’s spent refining his pogo stick, the BowGo. Razor, the company that rode the toy scooter to riches in the early 2000s, licensed Brown’s technology in 2010 and sells a children’s version of his stick, which they call the BoGo.

(See full article at link) - Smithsonian Magazine

The pogo stick as we know it bounced into existence around 1918, and it's been thrilling kind of entertaining kids ever since. But in the past 10 years or so, the pogo stick has experienced an unexpected renaissance, and a new use has sent its popularity -- at least among a certain set -- increasing by leaps and bounds.

Formerly wimpy toy, meet today's teenager. Raised on extreme sports such as skateboarding, BMX and FMX, a small but growing subset of teenagers -- we'll call them Generation X Gamers -- are literally taking pogoing to new heights.

Extreme pogo.

Confused? Don't be. It's exactly what it sounds like. The 34 competitors in this past weekend's Pogopalooza 7, the seventh-annual edition of the self-proclaimed "World Championship of Extreme Pogo," took part in four different disciplines: big air, high jump, tech and best trick. They did flips, spins and grinds. They soared as high as nine-and-a-half feet into the air.

They'll post their best tricks -- and, of course, their best spills -- on YouTube, and share them on extreme pogo websites.

And yes, some of them took pretty nasty spills on the concrete in Salt Lake City, where this year's competition was held. Such as Dalton Smith, at 13 one of the youngest competitors in Pogopalooza history, who underrotated while attempting a double backflip dismount and ended up with two smashed-up kneecaps, a broken nose and a one-night stay in the hospital.

[+] Enlargepogo
Chadd Deitz/Xpogo.comBig air, high jump, tech and best trick were the categories in the championship.

Broken bones and other injuries are common in extreme pogoing because, well, what goes up must come down.

"You fall from eight feet up in the air, onto cement, every single day," said Dan Mahoney, who broke the world record in the high jump for the third consecutive year by clearing the bar at 9 feet, 6 inches. "It's pretty hard on your joints."

But Mahoney, a 17-year-old high school student from Nova Scotia, Canada, said the chance of bodily injury is no surprise to competitors.

"It's an extreme sport, so obviously there's some risk involved," Mahoney said.

And these obviously aren't your playground-variety pogo sticks. These are serious sticks meant for those who would use them to land serious tricks.

Gone are the only slightly springy steel springs in the traditional model, replaced by a variety of airtime-producing apparatuses: compressed air cartridges; rubber bands that act like bungee cords; sticks that act like a bow shooting an arrow, compressing and snapping back out.

"It's sort of a blank canvas for science as far as what you can put between the handlebars and the foot pegs," said Nick Ryan, one of the organizers of Pogopalooza.

At 21, Ryan already has stopped competing in extreme pogo. He says you need a fearless mindset to last in this sport, and he no longer has it. These days he focuses on organizing the event and getting the word out about extreme pogo.

"What's interesting is that seven or eight years ago people would just laugh in my face because it's ridiculous if you have no context," Ryan said. "They're thinking of the sticks you get at Toys R Us that can only get six or seven inches off the ground. But as soon as they see [extreme pogo], and get an updated picture of what we're talking about, they don't laugh." - ESPN

The pogo stick as we know it bounced into existence around 1918, and it's been thrilling kind of entertaining kids ever since. But in the past 10 years or so, the pogo stick has experienced an unexpected renaissance, and a new use has sent its popularity -- at least among a certain set -- increasing by leaps and bounds.

Formerly wimpy toy, meet today's teenager. Raised on extreme sports such as skateboarding, BMX and FMX, a small but growing subset of teenagers -- we'll call them Generation X Gamers -- are literally taking pogoing to new heights.

Extreme pogo.

Confused? Don't be. It's exactly what it sounds like. The 34 competitors in this past weekend's Pogopalooza 7, the seventh-annual edition of the self-proclaimed "World Championship of Extreme Pogo," took part in four different disciplines: big air, high jump, tech and best trick. They did flips, spins and grinds. They soared as high as nine-and-a-half feet into the air.

They'll post their best tricks -- and, of course, their best spills -- on YouTube, and share them on extreme pogo websites.

And yes, some of them took pretty nasty spills on the concrete in Salt Lake City, where this year's competition was held. Such as Dalton Smith, at 13 one of the youngest competitors in Pogopalooza history, who underrotated while attempting a double backflip dismount and ended up with two smashed-up kneecaps, a broken nose and a one-night stay in the hospital.

[+] Enlargepogo
Chadd Deitz/Xpogo.comBig air, high jump, tech and best trick were the categories in the championship.

Broken bones and other injuries are common in extreme pogoing because, well, what goes up must come down.

"You fall from eight feet up in the air, onto cement, every single day," said Dan Mahoney, who broke the world record in the high jump for the third consecutive year by clearing the bar at 9 feet, 6 inches. "It's pretty hard on your joints."

But Mahoney, a 17-year-old high school student from Nova Scotia, Canada, said the chance of bodily injury is no surprise to competitors.

"It's an extreme sport, so obviously there's some risk involved," Mahoney said.

And these obviously aren't your playground-variety pogo sticks. These are serious sticks meant for those who would use them to land serious tricks.

Gone are the only slightly springy steel springs in the traditional model, replaced by a variety of airtime-producing apparatuses: compressed air cartridges; rubber bands that act like bungee cords; sticks that act like a bow shooting an arrow, compressing and snapping back out.

"It's sort of a blank canvas for science as far as what you can put between the handlebars and the foot pegs," said Nick Ryan, one of the organizers of Pogopalooza.

At 21, Ryan already has stopped competing in extreme pogo. He says you need a fearless mindset to last in this sport, and he no longer has it. These days he focuses on organizing the event and getting the word out about extreme pogo.

"What's interesting is that seven or eight years ago people would just laugh in my face because it's ridiculous if you have no context," Ryan said. "They're thinking of the sticks you get at Toys R Us that can only get six or seven inches off the ground. But as soon as they see [extreme pogo], and get an updated picture of what we're talking about, they don't laugh." - ESPN

Some consider 20-year-old Fred Grzybowski the best pogo-stick rider in the world, able to leap over a minivan, among other feats. But his days on top may be numbered.

This past weekend, at Pogopalooza 6, the world championship of the fledgling sport of extreme pogo, a pair of "xpogo" athletes who are 15 and 16 years old beat him in key competitions and set high-jump records.

The charming pogo stick of grainy movies has been revamped and rediscovered. Today's pogo athletes can jump eight feet high and can execute tricks similar to those seen in skateboarding and motocross. Kris Maher reports from Pittsburgh.

"They're progressing the sport," said Mr. Grzybowski, who has bounced in the background of several movies, including "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium." Mr. Grzybowski, from Los Angeles, did tie for first in one of the most difficult competitions here -- essentially slow-motion pogo sticking or fewest jumps per minute. The key is to jump so high that both stick and jumper linger in the air. He managed to keep his bounce count to 41 per minute, stretching each boing to last longer than a second.

Eight years ago, a burst of innovation helped transform pogo sticks from just another driveway diversion to a daredevil's ride -- much in the way that skateboards and snowboards vaulted to competitive prominence. Pogo riders today, mostly teenage risk-takers who might otherwise favor skateboarding, can bounce more than six feet in the air and perform spins and flips.

This weekend's competition attracted about 60 riders, between the ages of 13 and 24, drawn from 23 states as well as Canada and England. A few hundred spectators gathered in the hot sun to see jumpers compete for honors including Most Bounces in a Minute: 221, or nearly four per second.

At about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds, Mr. Grzybowski is believed to be the first to mix forward and backward flips, and he is working on landing a double back flip. He started riding a traditional pogo when he was eight years old. Several years later, he asked for an extreme pogo and a unicycle for Christmas.

Enlarge Image
Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.
Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.
Flybar

Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.

"I thought he was nuts," Mr. Grzybowski's father, Ed, says. Today, the young Mr. Grzybowski says he earns about $20,000 a year from appearances at fairs and trade shows as well as for stumping for one company's jumping stick.

The design of pogo sticks had barely changed between the time they were first patented and sold in the U.S. in 1919 to about 2000. Inventor George Hansburg promoted the toy by teaching dancers for the famous showman Florenz Ziegfeld how to pogo. He once staged a wedding where the bride and groom bounced into wedded bliss on pogo sticks.

In 2000, Irwin Arginsky, who bought out Mr. Hansburg in 1967, was approached by Bruce Middleton, a physicist who had gotten an idea while watching his daughter on her pogo stick. The physicist suggested a design using heavy-duty rubber bands (rather than old-fashioned steel springs) for propulsion. Soon after, Mr. Arginsky's company, SBI Enterprises, of Ellenville, N.Y., sold its first "Flybar," which could send a rider weighing up to 250 pounds five feet off the ground. The Flybar is Mr. Grzybowski 's stick of choice.

Mr. Arginsky says his company still sells nearly half a million traditional pogos each year, and he estimates that 40 million sticks have been sold since 1919. "Kids must have genes in them that make them want to jump," he says.

Other producers have also popped up: Mission Viejo, Calif., based Vurtego Inc., makes a stick that relies on compressed air instead of a spring and has developed a prototype with a booster that it claims can launch a rider 16 feet in the air.

A third extreme pogo model, called the BowGo, uses a strip of fiberglass that bends and recoils to provide lift. The stick is under development at Carnegie Mellon University and was born out of technology to enable robots to run.

"The highest I ever jumped was 42 inches, which I thought was pretty scary," says Ben Brown, the project scientist who developed the BowGo.

Such feats raise the obvious question: Even if it is possible to jump six feet in the air on a pogo stick, why would anyone risk it?
[pogo stick]

Mr. Brown says he has been found unconscious several times after taking spills on his experimental pogo. There were no major accidents at Pogopalooza, but Jake Fagliarone, 16, of Estero, Fla., fell as he tried to land a back flip. His face hit the street, giving him a bloody abrasion near his right eye and a black eye.

"It&#3 - Wall Street Journal

Some consider 20-year-old Fred Grzybowski the best pogo-stick rider in the world, able to leap over a minivan, among other feats. But his days on top may be numbered.

This past weekend, at Pogopalooza 6, the world championship of the fledgling sport of extreme pogo, a pair of "xpogo" athletes who are 15 and 16 years old beat him in key competitions and set high-jump records.

The charming pogo stick of grainy movies has been revamped and rediscovered. Today's pogo athletes can jump eight feet high and can execute tricks similar to those seen in skateboarding and motocross. Kris Maher reports from Pittsburgh.

"They're progressing the sport," said Mr. Grzybowski, who has bounced in the background of several movies, including "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium." Mr. Grzybowski, from Los Angeles, did tie for first in one of the most difficult competitions here -- essentially slow-motion pogo sticking or fewest jumps per minute. The key is to jump so high that both stick and jumper linger in the air. He managed to keep his bounce count to 41 per minute, stretching each boing to last longer than a second.

Eight years ago, a burst of innovation helped transform pogo sticks from just another driveway diversion to a daredevil's ride -- much in the way that skateboards and snowboards vaulted to competitive prominence. Pogo riders today, mostly teenage risk-takers who might otherwise favor skateboarding, can bounce more than six feet in the air and perform spins and flips.

This weekend's competition attracted about 60 riders, between the ages of 13 and 24, drawn from 23 states as well as Canada and England. A few hundred spectators gathered in the hot sun to see jumpers compete for honors including Most Bounces in a Minute: 221, or nearly four per second.

At about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 140 pounds, Mr. Grzybowski is believed to be the first to mix forward and backward flips, and he is working on landing a double back flip. He started riding a traditional pogo when he was eight years old. Several years later, he asked for an extreme pogo and a unicycle for Christmas.

Enlarge Image
Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.
Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.
Flybar

Fred Grzybowski, an extreme pogo athlete, performs tricks during a promotional appearance in Pittsburgh.

"I thought he was nuts," Mr. Grzybowski's father, Ed, says. Today, the young Mr. Grzybowski says he earns about $20,000 a year from appearances at fairs and trade shows as well as for stumping for one company's jumping stick.

The design of pogo sticks had barely changed between the time they were first patented and sold in the U.S. in 1919 to about 2000. Inventor George Hansburg promoted the toy by teaching dancers for the famous showman Florenz Ziegfeld how to pogo. He once staged a wedding where the bride and groom bounced into wedded bliss on pogo sticks.

In 2000, Irwin Arginsky, who bought out Mr. Hansburg in 1967, was approached by Bruce Middleton, a physicist who had gotten an idea while watching his daughter on her pogo stick. The physicist suggested a design using heavy-duty rubber bands (rather than old-fashioned steel springs) for propulsion. Soon after, Mr. Arginsky's company, SBI Enterprises, of Ellenville, N.Y., sold its first "Flybar," which could send a rider weighing up to 250 pounds five feet off the ground. The Flybar is Mr. Grzybowski 's stick of choice.

Mr. Arginsky says his company still sells nearly half a million traditional pogos each year, and he estimates that 40 million sticks have been sold since 1919. "Kids must have genes in them that make them want to jump," he says.

Other producers have also popped up: Mission Viejo, Calif., based Vurtego Inc., makes a stick that relies on compressed air instead of a spring and has developed a prototype with a booster that it claims can launch a rider 16 feet in the air.

A third extreme pogo model, called the BowGo, uses a strip of fiberglass that bends and recoils to provide lift. The stick is under development at Carnegie Mellon University and was born out of technology to enable robots to run.

"The highest I ever jumped was 42 inches, which I thought was pretty scary," says Ben Brown, the project scientist who developed the BowGo.

Such feats raise the obvious question: Even if it is possible to jump six feet in the air on a pogo stick, why would anyone risk it?
[pogo stick]

Mr. Brown says he has been found unconscious several times after taking spills on his experimental pogo. There were no major accidents at Pogopalooza, but Jake Fagliarone, 16, of Estero, Fla., fell as he tried to land a back flip. His face hit the street, giving him a bloody abrasion near his right eye and a black eye.

"It&#3 - Wall Street Journal

(Video Clip, watch to see full review)
Once a popular playground toy, the humble pogo stick has gone global, as "extreme pogo" takes off as a competitive sport.

Height, distance, stamina and tricks are all tested at competitive level.

Mike Bushell joined three world record holders to see if he has what it takes to be a champion - BBC World News

(Video Clip, watch to see full review)
Once a popular playground toy, the humble pogo stick has gone global, as "extreme pogo" takes off as a competitive sport.

Height, distance, stamina and tricks are all tested at competitive level.

Mike Bushell joined three world record holders to see if he has what it takes to be a champion - BBC World News