Skipping rope: The advantages
The all-rounder for your fitness goals
Amazing for weight loss
Fitness is very individual and every body is different, but the basic principles are the same.
If you consume more calories than you burn, you will lose weight.
If you consume fewer calories than you burn, you will gain weight.
One of the most popular benefits of jumping rope is how quickly you can burn calories, especially when using heavy ropes.
Jumping rope is very easy, fun and amazingly effective for weight loss. In fact, you can burn up to 450 calories in just 15 minutes.
Improve your coordination
Whether you're watching your head or not, your brain always knows what your feet are doing. Jumping rope is good for coordination for this simple reason.
When jumping rope, your feet move up and down quickly as you jump, making it an excellent workout for sports where you are constantly changing direction, such as basketball, boxing, soccer or any other sport that requires a lot of whole-body coordination.
From the outside, jumping rope often looks very easy. However, it is important that the jump is made at exactly the right time. The right timing between the jump and the rope swing requires precise coordination of the individual movement patterns. With practice, your coordination skills will continuously improve.
Reduce foot and ankle injuries
How many professional basketball and soccer players end a season or even their career prematurely due to a foot or ankle injury?
A lot of them. In fact, about 25% of all injuries in the 2019 NBA postseason could be attributed to foot or ankle injuries.
Imagine that your body is a building. Your feet and ankles are the foundation of the building. You can't neglect them without risking the whole thing collapsing. However, if you make sure that your feet and ankles are strong enough and healthy, nothing and no one can bring you down so easily.
Jumping rope strengthens the muscles, ligaments and tendons that surround your feet and ankles, making you less susceptible to injury to these structures.
NOTE: Beginners often complain of sore feet after the first few training sessions. This is because you are working all those new, cool muscles around your feet and ankles that you haven't used regularly before. If you're new to jumping rope and your feet are sore, keep going but make sure you warm up well to avoid injury. So don't worry and continue with your training! With practice, the sore feeling in your feet will subside.
Improves your posture
We now live in a society where everyone spends most of their day bent over their computer and smartphone.
However, a persistently hunched posture causes the shoulders to slump and an increasingly hunched back to form. This deformity usually manifests itself in the form of discomfort in the lower back and intervertebral discs.
In contrast, the correct rope jump version pulls the shoulder blades back and straightens the spine. This has the added benefit of making you look taller again.
NOTE: Jumping rope won't make you taller, but the improved posture will make you stand up straighter, which will make you appear taller. Good posture is not only important while you exercise, it also improves digestion and blood flow to the brain.
Increases your bone density
Sports scientists from the USA have discovered that simply jumping up and down is one of the best exercises for improving bone density.
This makes jumping rope one of the best exercises for achieving healthy bones.
Why is improved bone density so important?
That's a good question.
Go back to the example from earlier and imagine that your body is a building. While your feet and ankles are the foundation, your bones are the infrastructure, the beams and pillars that hold the building together and stabilize it.
Bone density is an indicator of bone health - and strong bones are less likely to break.
The repetitive jumping motion of the jump rope benefits your bones in a way that lifting weights and other forms of cardiovascular exercise do not.
Helps you recover from an injury
Jumping rope correctly is a low-impact exercise that can help you recover from an injury.
When someone is injured and/or suffers a physical trauma, jumping rope is the most basic exercise to boost post-injury recovery.
The reason for this is that when performed correctly, the entire body is involved during the jump up and down. Jumping rope also has the advantage that you are exposed to a low impact load during the movement, which reduces the likelihood of re-injury.
A special kind of brain jogging
We know this might sound a little crazy, but according to the Jump Rope Institute, jumping rope helps you develop the left and right hemispheres of your brain, which improves spatial awareness and reading ability, as well as boosting memory and making you more mentally alert.
Jumping on the balls of your feet requires your body and mind to make many neuronal-muscular adjustments to imbalances caused by constant jumping.
As a result, dynamic balance, coordination, reflexes, bone density and muscular endurance are improved during exercise.
Jumping rope increases your intelligence as your brain is always actively involved. It monitors your rhythm and your whole-body coordination so that you can jump rope properly over time.
More than just cardio
We know that jumping with a thinner rope is a great endurance workout. Alternatively, you can run on the treadmill or get on the bike for an endurance workout.
In addition, we know that lifting weights is a great workout to build muscle mass.
We've developed weighted ropes to give you more than just a simple cardio workout that leaves you feeling out of breath at the end of an exercise.
If you use our heavy ropes during your intensive workout, you will not only train your endurance, but also your muscles. Your advantage: you kill two birds with one stone!
The skipping rope is a great way for beginners to burn a lot of calories and body fat.
It's fun!
Who said that getting fit has to be boring and torturous?
The training should deliver the results you want and be a lot of fun at the same time.
We love skipping ropes for all the reasons mentioned above and more. But the deciding factor for us personally jumping rope for many years is that it's great fun! There are endless tricks to learn and you have the opportunity to jump almost anywhere.
Why is it important that your training is fun?
If you hate doing something, you won't do it for long.
If your exercise routine is boring, painful or doesn't give you the results you want, you won't stick with it.
Jumping rope is fun, effective and, at just 15-30 minutes a day, fits perfectly into your schedule.