What is invisible box challenge and why is everyone going gaga over it?
The internet has become slave to a new challenge, and unlike the ice-bucket challenge, this one isn’t painful; it is near impossible. Behold the miraculous invisible box challenge.
This extraordinary feat, which was reportedly first performed back in 2014, comprises some really gravity-defying miming – you have to pretend to step on top of an invisible object. If it sounds simple, it really isn’t.
What brought this challenge and the lost art of miming back into the mainstream was the stunt being performed by two people: a student of the Anderson University in Indiana called Dontez Hines, and a Texas high school cheerleader called Ariel Olivar.
Stepping over you haters like???????? pic.twitter.com/RDbyl8ywlf
— teedoe (@thecvmevp) August 18, 2017
challenge accepted pic.twitter.com/QQ1JWbkXx0
— ariel (@arielo1220) December 2, 2017
But are others up for the challenge? Of course, they are. Are they successful? They are, most definitely, not.
Yea so...we don’t think this is how the challenge is suppose to work. Maybe it’s the socks ???????????? #boxchallenge #invisibleboxchallenge pic.twitter.com/B8XrBeL5Zj
— Champs Sports (@champssports) December 6, 2017
Melissa doing the #InvisibleBoxChallenge pic.twitter.com/vJNeOU5NHr
— Gary Johns (@gratefuljohns) December 5, 2017
A trick to learn how to step over #InvisibleBoxChallenge pic.twitter.com/5CPKVuP79V
— Steve McGranahan???????? (@wsredneck) December 6, 2017
Challenge complete #InvisibleBoxChallenge @MoniiTorres14 pic.twitter.com/uyhUK93O4M
— Valerie (@_valerie0) December 6, 2017
So, why is this challenge so difficult? Aside from the fact that it looks like pure sorcery, the invisible box challenge requires some serious amounts of fitness. It's not just one’s legs that are responsible for getting it done; one needs to employ one's whole body for this feat. That is, the entire body has to engage to hold one leg in place while the other leg is in motion.
Speaking to the fitness blog Self, trainer Amelia DiDomenico says: "It has to be your glutes [gluteus maximus – the main extensor muscle of the hip], your core, your back, your shoulders… your whole body has to be in cahoots because everything has to lift up."
“Strength is the ability of a muscle to exert force, whereas this is more like coordination of muscles. People who do flips and backflips, what allows them to do that is that every muscle is working together. It takes so much control and isolation to actually do it effectively," DiDomenico added.
In a piece titled “The physics of the invisible box challenge”, Rhett Allain of Wired, taking the example of Olivar, explains that “the girl is actually in the air for a little bit of time with only the gravitational force acting on her. This means that she could be considered a type of projectile motion [a form of motion experienced by an object or particle that is thrown near the Earth's surface and moves along a curved path under the action of gravity] only with a constant vertical acceleration of -9.8 m/s2."
Whatever it is, two things are certain: This trick is definitely not easy. And it looks very cool.
So, the next time you want to impress your friends, instead of trying to pull this off and breaking something (most likely your nose), just show them the video and appreciate what the human body is sometimes capable of.