Name: The incredible sport of cup stacking, explained
Uploaded: 2017-06-28T08:20:03.000Z
Duration: 8 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is sport stacking, or maybe you call it speed stacking, or cup stacking.

But whatever you call it, it has become a huge sport.

Versions are taught in PE classes, and show up on

Last year, more than 600,0000 people set a world record for stacking at the same time

Sport stacking’s basically a combination of formations

in which stackers upstack (stack up cups) or downstack (bring them down again).

It’s all a race against the clock, for new, mind-bendingly fast times.

The most common patterns are 3 cups, 3 cups, and 3 cups,

3 cups, 6 cups, and 3 cups — or a 3-6-3 — and then the cycle, which has you do a 3-6-3,

followed by a 6-6 and then a 1-10-1, which top stackers can do

I won the the 2014 and 2016 U.S. Nationals for women.

And I won the Junior Olympics in 2015 for women.”

He’s a former high school football and baseball player who is coach of the U.S. Sport Stacking

(Masters basically means that he’s a grown up, since a lot of stackers are teens or younger).

He holds occasional practices in his church’s basement, and those practices attract some

“Once I went to that first competition, then I was kinda hooked.

And then I kept going with the kids and kept competing.”

Amazing stackers like Melissa — and Mark — have put in hours and hours of practice.

Their goal is to break personal and world records, but you can see their skill when

Look at how quickly she does a slow set, just to clear her mind.

Here’s a newbie stacking and here’s Melissa.

The point is that people like Melissa have gotten so, so good they can do it all on autopilot.

But at the same time, stacking is not just raw talent, or even practice alone.

The best stackers have to develop highly advanced tactics.

When you become a speed stacking pro, you need to optimize for the milliseconds.

“I started stacking when I was in 6th grade, so I was 12 at that time,

and I was introduced in PE class, and we’ve been practicing since then.”

That means breaking down the quirks of the timer,

cups, and different competition formats to get record-breaking times.

It starts when your hands leave the timer and stops when they return.

In that space in between, there’s room for tactics to shave off crucial fractions of

“Most recently it’s the way that people start the timer.

So in the past people put their hands on the timer flat, like this.

But now people will cup their hands around the cup and they have their hands on the timer

It’s not the conventional way to do it, but doing so enhances the time it takes for

And having just those little differences makes a huge difference on your time.”

Here’s Melissa completing an amazing cycle, but because the stack falls after she hits

the timer too hard— “6.17 - scratch.”

— it’s what’s called “a scratch.”

You have to be sure you don’t miss the timer, too.

“When that happened to me, I touched the timer and started celebrating,

and just going back to my friends, but the timer never stopped.

That took another 2.1 seconds added to my time, otherwise it would have been my fastest

To top stackers, the right cups are just as important.

You can see that on the pro cups, the holes in the top are wider than the ones on my cups.

Different stackers like different cups (these are just a few of the sets Zhewei’s owned).

“These inks, you can really feel them.”

And that knowledge, along with different grip styles and all sorts of other adjustments,

It even works in the truly mesmerizing doubles event.

Because this sport is for a YouTube generation, new strategies travel almost instantly.

That keeps the competition really fierce.

That’s led to blazingly fast — and close — world record times, as well as

Stacking started in a California Boys and Girls Club in the early 80s.

This is patent number 4,586,709, for the original cup holding device.

But kids and PE teachers embraced it far beyond Oceanside, California.

You get some kids who really really enjoy it and they enjoy the competitive side of

Some kids like the idea that you don’t have to compete at it.

They’ll build pyramids, they’ll build towers, they’ll try to stack the cups and

So it really brings in so many things other than the stacking just as a sport.”

The sport quickly professionalized, both as a business and in the intensity of the competitions.

This is the patent for that stack mat, which is sold to stackers and, yes, speed

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The incredible sport of cup stacking, explained

crucial

rhythm

context

basically