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My Body

Tim Haft on Group Fitness Potential and Being a Punk

Tim Haft

Tim Haft is the founder of Punk Rope.

Primarily, I’m a sports guy. I’m not a fitness guy or a yoga guy, I’m a sports guy. If you’d asked me when I was a kid I would have said my dream was to be a professional athlete. But the problem was I wasn’t particularly good. Now I do get paid for jumping around, but it’s not what I would have thought.

I started as a personal trainer about 11 years ago, and it was really just for fun. If anything it was just to help my dad do better in his events. He was a marathoner and competitive tennis player, and I wasn’t really going anywhere with my "racquet ball career." I was always interested in performance and maximizing what you were given. And then because my dad was a marathoner, I got interested in long distance running and coached for five years, mostly beginning runners. The real reason I got into running, though, was because I had really severe back problems in my 30s and my orthopedist told me I shouldn’t do anything with impact, and being the punk that I am I said I’ll show you and went right into marathon training. 

But in 2003 I had knee surgery. I wanted to play sports but I couldn’t, and so I went back to the gym looking for somethin that spoke to me. I started to get into group fitness, even though I didn’t really like the classes I was finding. And so, I thought, why don’t I put together my own class, and if I’m the only guy in the room taking it with my headphones on, well fine. I started messing around in 2004, and the first Punk Rope class launched that fall, and now I think we have programs in 15 states. 

Personal training where you reach just one person at a time isn't that fulfilling. There’s something very different about a group, really about the potential. Group fitness is about connection. What I’ve tried to set out to do is connect with people and stay in touch with them beyond the hour that I’m teaching and then connect them with students in other parts of the city, and maybe even eventually with punk rope communities in other parts of the country. Community service is something that makes Punk Rope really unique. At first it was really informal. We did fundraisers for victims of Katrina and the tsunami. And then it got more formalized. We raised money to donate jump ropes to underserved New York City schools, and more recently we worked with the American Cancer Society on their Relay for Life. And then in October we partnered with the American Heart Association on their Inaugural Brooklyn Heart Walk. We led the warm up for the event, and then three of us jumped rope the whole 3 1/2 miles around Prospect Park. I’m just really happy that I get to share what I’m doing with really cool people.