Club Obi Wan

Hello Everyone!

I hope you are doing great!

So I finally decided to take the plunge and buy a paracord whip for learning whip cracking and of course for my indy outfit. I bought it from Eliason Whip co it should arrive in a couple of weeks.

I have some doubts and concerns about starting to whip craking. specially about eye protection. I have researched in several places and most of them say you only need long sleeves shirt, and a wide brim hat for face protection. but i haven't seen too much specifically about eye protection like to use glasses or some kind of special eye protection. which is the part that scares me and worries me the most about starting whip cracking.

Is because is not really that common? or is better to wear glasses?

Thank you!

There's no downside to wearing eye protection. Wear safety goggles when you are learning and get rid of them when you feel confident about your control of the whip. That said, with the mechanics of the whip, its going to be really tricky to hit yourself in the eye with the popper with force.

Eye protection certainly doesn't hurt. I've seen people use standard safety glasses/goggles. I personally never wore eye protection when learning, but if you think that it would make you feel safer, go for it! Long sleeves are probably a good idea. I wore long pants when starting out as well. I don't personally recommend wearing a wide brimmed hat while learning. It's easy to over compensate for the brim of the hat and really throw off the whip's alignment. That can cause you to hit yourself more often than if you aren't wearing a hat.

Hitting yourself is certainly one of the concerns when you get started, but I promise you that it won't happen very often if you are using the whip correctly. The full force of the crack should never be anywhere near your body. I highly recommend watching videos by Adam Winrich in order to learn your first few cracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWxd0dJlKNk This one teaches the Cattleman's crack, (or forward crack, or circus crack, or lion tamer crack, etc.) which I find to be the most basic crack. A lot of the other aspects of whip cracking are built off of skills learned from mastering this crack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTIIZYE7XwE This video has a whip lesson plan for beginners, which explains the most basic cracks and an easy order to learn them in.

Good luck on your whip cracking journey. Once you master the basics, it's a lot of fun! If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message. I'm happy to answer literally any whip cracking-related questions.

-WNY Indy