A simple jump rope is a versatile and effective strength and conditioning tool. It’s also a lost art. As I’ve covered elsewhere it is inexpensive, it’s useful for warming up, metabolic conditioning, ankle/foot/shin development, overall athleticism, and foot speed. It’s also effective in team strength and conditioning settings.
Jumping rope is also a skill and a lot of athletes are not coming into programs with that skill anymore. Lots of reasons for that, none of them are important – the important thing is that we can’t assume that they have the skill. It has to be taught if it is going to be used.
In an earlier post I have covered the “home row” of jumping rope. This means just jumping over the rope using both feet. When an athlete begins learning this skill, this will seem like a complex movement and they will struggle with coordination and will waste a lot of energy performing this movement. With time and practice they will get this down. You will know this is the case when they can sustain jumping rope and when they are no longer needing to jump high off the ground to clear the rope.
At that point a decision needs to be made. Do we make the movements more challenging or just leave it here? To a point, I like to make the movements more challenging to combat boredom and to help expand the athlete’s physical skillset. With that in mind, I’ll progress through three more skills (in the order listed):
- Jump side to side
- Jump forwards and backwards
- Criss cross the feet while jumping
With each of these skills, I’ll have the athlete reset on home row (i.e. jumping in place, straight up over the rope) between skills and whenever a mistake is made. For example:
Jump rope, home row, 30 seconds
Side to side, 30 seconds
Home row, 10 seconds
Forwards/backwards, 30 seconds
Home row, 10 seconds
Criss cross, 30 seconds
Etc.
On the other hand, if we’re jumping side to side and we make a mistake and get tangled up, then we’ll start back over on home row before moving again to side to side jumping.
The skills described will be sufficient for how most athletes use the jump rope. For those, like boxers, who may be putting in a lot of time with the ropes then I can see the need to add more skills – but for most of our athletes this will be sufficient.
