Learning a Standing Backflip in 24 Hours: Three Coaches, 150 Attempts, and a Mental Wall
Michelle Khare
In this episode of her "Challenge Accepted" series, Michelle sets out to learn a standing backflip in 24 hours or less, something she describes as a lifelong dream. By her own standard, success means landing the flip on her feet with no help from anyone. To get there, she brings in three coaches with very different backgrounds. The video follows how each of them approaches the skill, how far she gets in a single day, and why the last step turns out to be less about technique than about her head and her body's limits.
The Coaching Team and the Premise
Michelle calls her coaches "the Avengers of backflips." Christopher Troy is a professional stuntman. Margzetta Frazier is a competitive gymnast on the UCLA gymnastics team. Yoshi Sudarso is introduced as a professional cheerleader, a 2011 competition winner, and also a Power Ranger. The idea is that she gets "the gamut" of backflip styles. Cheer teaches how to generate momentum into the flip. Gymnastics teaches how to make it as clean and pretty as possible, which Michelle hopes she can reach by the end even if she starts out "dirty and ugly."
When she asks whether learning the flip in one day is realistic, the coaches answer with a run of joking encouragement. One serious point does come through early: a lot of the skill is visualization, and if she can picture herself doing it, she'll be able to land it.
Starting With the Fall
The coaches don't agree on where to begin. One suggests a spotted back tuck right away to see where she stands. Another proposes stacking mats so she can practice jumping up into a "candlestick." Troy argues for starting with the worst-case scenario. When he prepares a new stunt, he says, he needs to "feel the floor" first, and he will sometimes deliberately crash before attempting the real thing. Once he has experienced the worst outcome, it is no longer in his way. Michelle agrees to try his approach.
The softened version has her take a flat backfall onto a mat in a tuck position. The coaches correct her landing ("try not to land on your butt first, try to land kind of flatter") and remind her to keep her chin tucked to her chest. They also disagree a little about where she should look. One coach says that technically a back tuck wants the chin in, and that they wouldn't tell her to look for the floor.
Early on, a coach names the main problem with the setup: "too many cooks in the kitchen" could confuse her. All three know how to do a backflip, but each has their own method. They decide to split up and coach her one at a time.
Troy continues with jumping flat backs, then moves the mat away so she gets used to falling backward. He tells her to keep her hands above her head so she can protect it if she freaks out at the last second. In an aside, he says his stunt background gives him knowledge of safety and of how to push through a scary move. He expects the challenge to be "all mental" for Michelle, as it is for most people.
Yoshi's Spotted Jumps and the Arm Swing
Yoshi takes over next and promises to spot her the whole way without letting go. They begin with straight jumps. Michelle realizes she shouldn't be jumping straight up but slightly backward. Yoshi then adds a tuck at the top of the jump and tells her to bring her knees up to her chest.
The next step is to actually throw the flip. Yoshi explains that the arms move in an almost circular motion and help pull the body around. Getting the legs over with leg power alone is hard, and the arms supply extra rotation. On her first real attempt, though, Michelle doesn't do the move they practiced. She throws her head back and loses track of the floor. Yoshi hands her off to Margzetta to refine the movement.
Margzetta's Progression: Rolls, Candlesticks, and the Open Snap
Margzetta says that in gymnastics everything is extremely technical and focused on perfection. With Michelle, though, she wants her to do whatever feels comfortable and leave perfection for later. She starts by having Michelle roll backward and land on her feet. When Michelle goes very slowly, Margzetta tells her to think about getting her feet to the floor rather than about the roll itself.
Next comes the candlestick. Michelle jumps onto her back on the raised mats with her legs straight up, and only then tucks. After that she does the same jump into a backward roll that finishes on her knees. Margzetta tells her that this jump is "the hardest part," the open snap jump. Once she has that momentum, grabbing her legs should carry her through the flip.
Margzetta also explains the physics. Anything rotates according to how wide or compact it is. Starting open makes you flip slowly, and making your body small makes you flip fast.
Moving to the Trampoline
The group moves to a trampoline. Michelle is told to count "one, two, three" and not to think, because her body will do it. A coach stands ready to spot her and step in only if needed. After a few attempts she lands a flip by herself, which everyone celebrates.
Troy repeats Margzetta's point with an ice-skating comparison: skaters extend wide and then pull in, and that contraction after expansion is where the rotation comes from. Michelle describes her motion as going "up and around and pulling."
Margzetta then raises where Michelle should look. Many people close their eyes during gymnastics, so she asks Michelle to fix her eyes on the bottom of a wooden beam for as long as she can before tucking. The next attempt is noticeably higher.
Fading the Spot and Watching Playback
Back on the floor, the coaches say she has handled the morning's progressions well. The plan is to start with a full spot and take it away bit by bit. They warn about "negative returns," because the body can only take so much, and they don't want her forcing anything at the expense of safety.
The spotted attempts reveal a timing problem. She tucks too early and stays very open. The coaches stress the difference between bringing the chest down to the knees and bringing the knees up to the chest; the second is what she should be doing. They have her watch video playback of her attempts and explain why. In the middle of a movement, you can be sure you're doing one thing while actually doing something else, so an outside view matters. Watching the footage, she sees that she "piked out" even though it felt straight to her.
A coach adds that a backflip doesn't require a huge jump. He can do a small one as long as he tucks hard, because tightness matters more than jump height.
When It Becomes Mental
When someone suggests one more attempt, a coach advises against it. If she balks, he says, it will put more negative thoughts in her head. Michelle lies down on the mat. She describes the problem this way: she knows all the steps, but once she's in the air there's no time to do any of them, and then it's over.
The coaches discuss her situation away from her. They say that what she has done in a couple of hours takes people weeks or even years to learn, and that at this point it's all mental. They also suggest that a skill like this is one you'd prefer to sleep on, so the body can catch up with the mechanics the mind has learned. In their view, the 24-hour limit is the hardest part of the challenge. They agree to rest her and bring her back without pushing so far that things start to go downhill.
In the second session she gets closer but keeps making the same mistakes. Her arms need to reach her legs faster, and her head still goes back. One coach notices a pattern. Every time he says he won't give her a big spot, she completes the rotation fully, which to him is a sign that the obstacle is mental. After a good attempt, the coaches decide to stop. They think her mentality will only decline from there, so they want to "end on an up," let her sleep, and give her mind and body time to connect.
The Morning After and Beyond
Michelle says she hadn't reached her goal of landing a standing backflip on her own. She planned one final attempt the next morning, an hour before the 24-hour window closed. Over the day she had tried the backflip more than 150 times. That night she used a hot tub and a massage gun to recover. When she got up the next morning, she found her whole body so sore that she decided another attempt wasn't a good idea, and she canceled the session with Yoshi.
The footage then jumps to a rescheduled session about a week later, when she says her abs are still feeling the effects. Yoshi's view is that she technically did the backflip within the 24 hours, but that she is ambitious and wants it clean on the floor, and with more time she'll get it. In one attempt, Yoshi says they barely touched her.
Michelle's conclusion is that she still hasn't landed the backflip to her own standard. She has met with Yoshi a few more times since and feels she's getting closer, and she's happy with how far she got in the 24-hour window. She plans to keep training until she can do it alone, and she accepts that this will take time and rest.
Thank you so much to VitaFusion for sponsoring today's video.
What's up, guys? Welcome back to my YouTube channel. On this episode of Challenge Accepted, I am going to attempt to learn a standing backflip in 24 hours or less. To achieve this tall order, I have assembled the Avengers of backflips: Christopher Troy, professional stuntman; Margzetta Frazier, competitive gymnast on the UCLA gymnastics team; Yoshi Sudarso, professional cheerleader and winner of 2011 Worlds, also a Power Ranger. Hopefully, with the power of the coaches combined, I will get to achieve my lifelong dream of doing a backflip, and then I'll be the cool person at the party who can do backflips. Challenge accepted.
But before we get to backflipping, I want to say a huge thank you to VitaFusion, America's number one gummy vitamin brand, for sponsoring today's episode and making awesome experiences like this possible. VitaFusion multivitamins are specifically formulated for adults to support overall health and wellness, and they are super tasty. I personally have been loving the women's gummies, and I take two a day. One of my favorite parts about VitaFusion is that they have planted over 200,000 fruit trees in partnership with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation to support underserved communities. That is amazing, and I love when people give back. So if you want to try some out for yourself, you can check them out via the link below.
Troy, Margzetta, Yoshi, I have assembled you, the masters of backflips, today to hopefully teach me how to do one before the end of today. Do you guys think this is possible? Fully. We're good. Everything's fine. You're gonna do great. The sky is the limit. Just believe in your dreams. Okay, great. I just spewed out every inspirational quote. There's no I in team.
No, you're gonna be fine. It's up here. A lot of it is visualization of being able to do it. Okay. If you see yourself doing it, you'll be able to land it. You're getting the gamut of everything that you can do with a backflip. You can get momentum into it with cheer. You can be as pretty as possible, hopefully at the very end of it, like her. But she can start dirty and ugly like me, right?
Where should we start? Do you guys want to huddle? Do you want to go first? Should we talk? Let's talk about it. We can start off with doing a spotted back tuck with her and see where she is. What I'm thinking is we stack those resis over there and she jumps up to a candlestick a few times.
Usually when I'm prepping for something, I'm like, I don't know if I can do this. I need to feel the floor, so I like to wreck before I throw anything on the floor. Do you want to know why? It's because I did the worst. Now I can do it. It's not in my way anymore. I want to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Are we putting hands?
One of us is the truth, the other two are lies. Okay, Michelle, I've convinced them to start with what I would do. In my head, I have to know what the floor feels like, right? Because that's the thing that's the enemy. That's the worst that could happen. So we're gonna do a softer version of that. You're gonna come over here and just take a backfall or a flat back onto this, in a tuck.
That's it. Perfect. Are you all going to move the mat out? No, we're not gonna. Yeah, over here. We'll stand over here. We won't, not yet. Okay. Okay.
Don't be nice to her right now, okay? She's not gonna learn if we're nice. Try not to land on your butt first. Try to land kind of flatter. Yeah. So you're hearing that? Okay. So because we're doing flat back, and I know you've learned this already, you're keeping your chin to your chest. On the day with the backflip, you're going to come up and you're going to end up finding yourself, right?
I'll be honest with you, I'm probably not going to tell her to look for it because for a back tuck, technically, you want your chin in there. Yeah, but I want you to go. Have you ever done that with the ball here? I just think you should have so much fun. Yeah. Oh my gosh, she's the opposite of a gymnast. What is happening?
I think the biggest challenge is too many cooks in the kitchen. That could lead to confusing Michelle. I promise you we know what we're doing, but we may need to break off and just do it separately, because I think we all have proven that we can do a backflip. Yep, yep. We have our own methods, right?
All right, you go for it. Oh yeah, you're gonna hit the— I don't want to hit the floor first. You're not. Okay, so this thing is safe. That floor, a little less safe. I think we're gonna get there, right? Yeah. Okay, so do a couple more of these jump flat backs. Perfect.
You feel too comfortable with this. I'm going to move this. Hey, Yosh, can I get you real quick? I thought you told me you wanted me out of here. No, just the top one. I've actually wanted to drop there. It doesn't hurt, promise. I thought I was landing on my feet today. Okay, you will.
Okay, you're jumping backwards. Jump up. Okay, right. I'm gonna be right here. Don't move it. I know. Oh my God. I'm doing that. I'm holding it. Whoa, okay. Now one more. Keep those hands up above you, and they can always live there. In case I freak out at the last second, I can protect my head.
So with my background as a professional stuntman, I have the knowledge of safety, but also the ability to kind of get through it. I know it's going to be all mental for Michelle, just like it is for most people. Look at her face. If you can see her face, she's going— Breathe, girl.
So Yoshi is going to take over. I want you to think about the landing. I'm going to spot you the whole way. I'm not going to let go. Oh my God, I promised someone. Oh no, I would never. I would never. Here we swing. We do a straight jump. Pants almost came off. Good. So I'm not going straight up in the air. I'm going a little back.
Good. So now all I want you to do is do that same thing and just tuck. And up. Good. One more time. Think about getting your knees up to your chest. Okay. That was it. Good. Feels like I'm about to do it. That's what we're about to do.
So the next step, I just want you to try to throw it. Your arms go in almost a circular motion, and all you're going to do is you're going to wrap around and try to get your legs over, because this is hard to do with just your legs. If you have your arms, you can help pull. And I won't hit you in the face? You won't hit me in the face. Okay, wait, touch me.
But when she threw herself, instead of doing this thing that we worked on, you did this. Where's the floor? Now we're gonna refine your movements. I'm gonna let Marz take that. Okay.
So with my gymnastics background, everything is incredibly technical and perfect. When it comes to teaching Michelle how to do this flip, I'm gonna really encourage her to just do what feels comfortable and just worry about the perfection part later.
I'm gonna get you lit with the landings. Lit with the landings. So we're gonna literally just roll back and land on our feet, right? Yep, and you just go, and it's rolling up. Yeah. Can I put my hands here for them? Of course. Okay, okay. Yeah, okay. That wasn't crazy. She's going hella slow.
Think about feet to the floor. Don't think about the roll. Think about feet to the floor. That's the body's just the float. Yes. Hey, looks good. That's really solid. I'm gonna see how high you can jump. You're gonna jump to your back and do something called a candlestick. It's pretty much this. You're landing like that on there. You're gonna try your best. You're gonna try your very hardest.
To your back and feet up. Yeah. Oh my God. Now tuck later. So you're gonna do candlestick, legs straight, and then when you get here, then you're gonna tuck. Tuck. Awesome. And just roll. So on the next one, you're gonna do the same exact thing, and then when you're on your back, you're gonna do a back tuck roll to your knees, exactly what you just did after here. Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll. Yeah.
So you just did the hardest part, which is the open snap jump, and now when you have this momentum, as long as you grab your legs, you're gonna make the flip. To get anything to rotate, it's all about changing its width. If you start open, you're going to flip slow. If you want to flip fast, you make your body small. You want to go to a trampoline, do some on there? Sure.
So you're going to start right here, and you're gonna go one, two, three. Don't even think about it, okay? Your body is gonna do it. That was cool. I'm here. I'm gonna come in when I need to, but I'm not gonna do my left hand. I will spot here. Okay. You got this. You just did it. Okay.
Tell me if you're not gonna go, because my heart. Okay. Okay, easy. Aggression's way there. That was great. Think more about tucking. Just get all the way around. My motion is, as soon as I go, it's going up and around and pulling.
Marz said something really great about this idea: when you expand and then you contract is where you get that rotation, right? Just like ice skating. They're wide and like, wow. That's where you get your rotation.
That was easy. That was it. Oh my gosh. Was that cool? Yeah, that was cool. You landed it by yourself. We're gonna do it again? Yeah, absolutely. It looks good. It's all about just refining everything.
Do you see anything? That's a really good question. Are you looking at anything? A lot of people close their eyes when they do gymnastics. So can you spot the bottom of that wood beam? Uh-huh. Just try to look at it for as long as you can. Eye on it and then tuck. Okay. Okay, ready? Yep. Nice. Oh my God, yo, that was so much higher. Really?
You have been by yourself. We've done all this stuff this morning. We really feel like you've got it handled. So we'll do it with my full spot, and then I'll take away spot little by little by little by little, and we'll just see how far we can get, because we don't want to get into negative returns, right? Your body can only take so much. I don't need you to force anything because we want you to be safe.
You got it. Ready to just throw one with a spot? Okay, your spot is over there. We're going to go super aggressive, hit at the apex. Ready, set. Okay. Get one out of the way. That's fine. You tucked super early. You were very open. I think this goes that versus this, right? Yeah, there you go. Chest doesn't come down to knee. Knees to chest. Yes. Oh, my head's going back. That's the difference. Yeah, yeah. You should feel like you're— That's what's gonna happen here.
Yeah, I know. You want to watch playback? Watch the playback. Watch the limit so you can kind of see. Yeah, this is really important because sometimes when you're doing something, you are swearing, I was going left, right, or whatever it is, and you're definitely not doing it. So you need that outer perspective. So you see how you're open like that? You piked out. Really? Yeah, I feel straight. You could have made that.
You don't need a huge jump to do a backflip. You can do it small, but I'm gonna tuck like a mother trucker. And when I'm fortified, as long as it's small, if I'm tight, I'm going to get around. But that tightness is more important than jump.
You guys should try one more. No, no, I actually really don't think you should. Okay. Because you're gonna not do it, and then it's gonna put more negative thoughts into your head. Okay, I'm just gonna lay down. Lay down. You think she needs to chill for just a second? Yeah. It's like I know all the steps, and then I get in the air, and it's like, oh, there's no time to do any of the steps, and then it's over.
What she has done in the span of a couple hours, it takes people weeks to learn, if not years. She has it. It's just all mental at this point. Yeah, it's almost one of those things that you would prefer to sleep on, so your body goes ahead and catches up with all of your mind mechanics. Then you're like, got it. So the 24-hour challenge is the hardest part of it, right? I think we bring her back in after she's a little bit rested and see how far we can get. Absolutely. But I don't think we need to go for the net, otherwise it's going to start going downhill. Of course. That's it.
Cool. That'd have been good if you jumped. Yeah, I got a turn already. Whoa, that's not cool. And I want you to give me a big yell. Deeper. Okay, go. Nice. Nice. All right. Yes.
Get there faster. The arms need to get to the legs faster. Whoa. Yeah, head still went back. We're burning daylight, Michelle. I know. Oh, almost had it. Almost had it. I got it.
All right, it is mental now, because every time I say I'm not going to give you a big spot, you do it fully. All right, come on, nail it. Ah. Nah, deep from here, from here. Don't throw up. Okay, go. Oh. I like that one. That was a good one.
I think your mentality right now is just going to go down from here. You've constantly been doing this, right? Consistently. I say we end on an up, sleep it off, and again, your brain is going to catch up to your body. You need the rest to get the mind-body connection. It's a real thing.
My goal within 24 hours was to land a standing backflip, landing on my feet all by myself, and I didn't quite get that. So I'm gonna rest and recover and try again in the morning, one hour before the 24-hour period, one last time, to see if I can land this thing on my two feet.
During the course of the day, I attempted the backflip over 150 times. That night, I tried resting and recovering. I went in the hot tub, I used my massage gun, and ultimately, when I woke up in the morning ready and excited for my final attempt, I stood up and realized it probably wasn't a good idea.
I feel so sore. My whole body is destroyed. I don't know how I'm going to do this.
So I canceled my training session with Yoshi, rescheduling it for a few days in the future for one more final attempt. Okay, good. Oh, dude. It's been a week, and my abs.
In the span of 24 hours, she technically did the backflip. I think she did the backflip, but again, she's really ambitious and wants it clean on the floor. With more time, she'll get it.
Holy— I barely touched you. Are you serious? I barely touched you.
Okay, so I still didn't get the backflip, but I'm gonna keep trying. I've already met with Yoshi a couple more times and we're getting closer and closer. And while I didn't land it to my standard within the 24-hour period, I'm really, really happy with how far I got. We're gonna keep meeting up, and I'm gonna see if I can finally do this by myself. But I also recognize that that takes time and rest, so right now I'm gonna go rest before I try this all over again.
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