If you’re looking to improve your agility, quickness, and coordination without fancy equipment or a gym membership, all you need is a jump rope! It’s the ultimate at-home tool for developing faster feet, burning through calories, and strengthening your brain-body connection.
Here at TB12, we love using both lighter speed ropes and heavier power ropes to train our clients – both for the great workout they offer and the numerous health, fitness, and sport benefits that jumping rope can provide.
Brain-Body Connection
When you jump rope, you connect your body with your mind and create constant neuromuscular adjustments to maintain balance on the balls of your feet. Enhancing this brain to muscle connection allows your brain to become subconsciously aware of where your feet are and what they are doing. By practicing this over and over again, you are essentially making yourself lighter on your feet and improving your balance, coordination, and quickness.
While jumping rope, you’re combining timing and rhythm and constantly making quick calculations to recognize the rope’s distance, speed, direction, and position relative to your body – all in an effort to maintain continuous rotations. Challenge yourself with a jump rope, change your speed, jump strategy, or even perform tricks – the benefit can be almost as much mental as it is physical.
Burn Calories Fast
Research has shown that jumping rope can help you burn roughly 1,300 calories per hour – or about 0.1 calories consumed per jump. Even ten minutes of jumping rope can burn through the calorie equivalent of running an eight-minute mile. The fat burning is even more substantial with a heavy rope because more muscle groups are engaged with every rotation.
Bone Density Improvement
Studies show jumping rope is one of the very best exercises for improving bone density in athletes of all ages as well as the elderly. By jumping rope, you’ll actively be working on injury prevention – not only will you improve your ability to stay light on your toes, balance, and coordination, you’ll also increase bone density and strength in muscles surrounding your ankle and foot. These three benefits of jumping rope will decrease your chance for ankle and foot sprains, strains, and fractures.
Left and Right Brain Development
Research conducted by the Jump Rope Institute has shown that jumping rope helps with the development of the left and right hemispheres of your brain, enhancing spacial awareness, reading skills, memory, and making you more mentally alert. BrainHQ describes the best exercise for the brain as involving a combination of timing, rhythm, coordination, and mental strategy. I know jumping rope can be frustrating at first, but don’t give up after one workout session – there’s a learning curve for your mind just as much as there is one physically for your body. Just like anything else in life, practice makes perfect, the more you practice, the better you will perform!
