3 Most Effective Rope Jumping Exercises

Rope Jumping is an intensive, rewarding exercising technique that sharpens your agility and provides a great cardio workout. After all, if it’s good enough for professional boxers like Floyd Mayweather. Learning these jump rope workouts for fitness can become an enjoyable and crucial part of your regular workout routine.

These three exercises will get you started:-

1. Timed Rope Jumping

This exercise is a simple variant of the most basic rope jumping exercise. Not only is it extremely effective for boosting your physical fitness and quickly burning off the calories, but it is also very easy to do.

Perform a set of rope jumps as you normally would – keeping your feet together and keeping the jumps short, fast and consistent – but try do as many as you can for one minute, then stop for 15 to 30 seconds of rest, then go again. Alternatively, you may want to aim for a specific number of jumps in any time before you take a brief rest, then perform the same number of jumps again. Depending on your fitness, you should aim for approximately 5-10 cycles of these sets of jumps.

To benefit the most from this routine, try not to let your muscles and form flop as you feel the burn and fatigue, as tempting as it may be. You should try to work out the minimum amount of jumps you feel you should accomplish in one minute or the maximum amount of time you ought to take to perform a specific set of jumps. You should also keep your resting time the same for each cyclone of jumps to keep your heart racing, and to maintain a good exercise rhythm.

You might want to vary your cycles with different kings of jumps – for example, one cycle you may perform normal jumps, whilst in the next cycle you hop on your feet over the rope, alternating between your right and left foot. This simple exercise is a great cardio workout, and intense sessions will really strengthen your shoulder muscles. To see the basic jump rope techniques described here in action, check out the video:-

2. Forwards and Backwards Rope Jumping

This exercise builds on the rope jump by having you move forwards and backwards as you skip. The advantage to this exercise is that you aren’t just stuck in one place jump roping and, as well as increasing your strength and stamina, this exercise can really improve your balance. There are a few variations for this routine, though you should get used to the basic technique first.

Start jump roping as normal, but move forward by walking over the rope as it passes under your legs. Don’t use both feet to jump over the rope, but alternate between left and right for each jump. This may be difficult to get used to at first. As such, you may wish to start this routine by alternating between your left and right feet every two jumps, then moving onto every one jump when you feel comfortable.

Once you’ve moved forwards across the room, perform the exercise backwards. Jump roping backwards alternating your feet for every jump is much more difficult than it is for moving forwards, so you will probably want to alternate between every two jumps to begin with.

Once you’ve mastered these basic techniques, you can start to vary your routine. One of the most effective variations here is to use a skiing-style side step for every jump, which particularly helps to develop the outer parts of your hips and thighs. To perform the side step, bring your foot inwards next to the opposite leg and as the rope passes under your legs bring your foot outwards onto the floor. You can only perform the side steps by alternating between your feet after every jump.

You can see the basic technique in action along with a brief explanation here:-

3. Side-to-Side Rope Jumping

In the second exercise you went forwards and backwards – but now you’re going to go from side to side! This exercise is excellent for improving your agility, especially in games such as football where you need to get past the sides of your opponents. It’s also great for improving your agility in general, as it builds up the outer and inner parts of your thighs and legs, and strengthens your calves and ankles.

To perform this exercise just adopt the simple jump rope technique, but push your legs from one side of the room and back. You may need to stretch your elbows out a little more than when you are rope jumping on the spot, in order to support the momentum of your body moving sideways. However, like the other rope jumping exercises, you should not keep your feet too far apart otherwise you may damage your joints. Note that this exercise may take some getting used to, since you need to time the rope to land under your legs whilst simultaneously moving side-to-side. You also need to make sure your feet do not hit the ground too early.

As well as moving to one side of the room and back, you can also try out another side-to-side technique. From standing position, jump over the rope with both feet to right, then to the left, and then repeat the exercise – this exercise particularly helps strengthen your ankle joints. Once you are confident with the side-to-side technique, you can mix it up with forwards, backwards and timed jumps to form a comprehensive rope jumping routine.

Here’s the side-to-side technique in action:-