Jump Rope - The Ultimate Exercise?
Tell nearly anyone that you jump rope for exercise and they will automatically consider you the rival of a triathlete for endurance and the equivalent of a gymnast for coordination. Unfortunately, however, this common perception intimidates many people from trying an exercise that has so much going for it:
- Develops aerobic conditioning (endurance), speed, agility, coordination, position sense, rhythm, timing, and burns calories - in short, every area of physical fitness except for flexibility.
- Is readily available to nearly anyone since it is inexpensive and doesn't require special facilities.
- Is a safe form of exercise if correctly done.
- Has tremendous variety since there are literally thousands of skills.
- Can be tremendous fun, especially when done to music.
- Is as much fun to watch a highly skilled jumper as it is to do - rope jumping is one of the few aerobic exercises featured in entertainment.
To understand the importance of proper instruction, it helps to compare rope jumping to another exercise - swimming. With enough perseverance, anyone can learn swimming, but many (especially adults) will quit without instruction before learning the proper stroke because you feel awkward, flounder, go nowhere, and get easily exhausted in the beginning. While good instruction doesn't eliminate the awkward, energy-inefficient phase of learning to swim, it helps to minimize it and shorten this phase of mastery. People seem to understand this about swimming, but often don't anticipate that rope jumping also requires instruction and practice to master - perhaps because it looks so easy at first.
The key to making rope jumping less strenuous for everyone is to avoid prolonged constant jumping until you learn the proper coordination AND your muscles adapt to the demands of jumping - particularly the calves and their attachment to the shins. The program I developed, called Ropics, avoids prolonged jumping in the beginning by having students alternate short periods of jumping with periods of non-jumping skills. To help with learning the skills of rope jumping more easily, the skills are taught in a step-by-step fashion whenever possible.
Human Kinetics Publishers offers a book I wrote that is based on these principles. "Ropics - The Next Jump Forward in Fitness" is designed for adult jump rope enthusiasts. "The Jump Rope Primer Book" or companion video was written for elementary physical education teachers looking to introduce a unit of rope jumping into their curriculum.
Other good, more traditional jump rope instructional material can be found on the USAJRF web site on their products page or "other recommended product page." Answers to the most common questions about exercising with a jump rope can be found on my Jump Rope FAQ page.
