Health Benefits of Skipping Rope
Do you want to do rope skipping? It’s one of the easiest, most fun things to learn. From kids to adults, you will see people of all kinds of ages and ethnic backgrounds who enjoy skipping rope – there’s no restriction to it. A jumping rope can be brought to your work, school, and any other place and be performed with no prior training needed. All you need is a rope, and you are good to go. What’s more, ropes made from plastic are utilized in gyms, and they are helpful for use in speed work. As you get a rope, you need to be certain that it gets fitted comfortably.
Most of the ropes range from a length of 7 to around 10 feet. You can adjust the size accordingly. However, you can’t extend the rope once it gets cut, obviously. All you need to do is to stand upright on the middle of the skipping rope and hold the ends at the height of your waist. Make adjustments accordingly.
You need to select a flat surface over which you can jump comfortably. This is to make sure that you don’t get any injury, such as an ankle sprain, as you stand on an uneven surface like a sloppy hill. You also need to make sure there aren’t any objects or anything on the surface which makes jumping difficult, such as rocks or grass.
Benefits of Rope Skipping
There are many different benefits pertaining to rope skipping. Some of the advantages of rope skipping include the following:
- An Improvement in Coordination
Rope skipping is great for improving your mental coordination as it helps you to keep your focus during it. You stay aware of your balance as you focus on your feet. The brain gets into a vigilant state, and with habitual practice, you tend to feel yourself getting lighter on the feet. If you are training yourself for an advanced movement style, such as Tai Chi or Obstacle Course Race, then it is great to start with something as simple and effective as skipping ropes. You will be able to get more coordinated and conscious using the jump rope, and you will gain more coordination and consciousness as you practice the game time and again.
- Alleviates Injuries in the Foot and Ankle
Skipping rope is highly beneficial for the people who get active in different sports. A lot of professional athletes in tennis, football, and other kinds of sports fall prey to different injuries in the foot or the ankle and then stop the game quickly. It is quite a common condition in basketball as well as tennis. Not only will skipping ropes improve your feet’ coordination, but it will also improve your overall muscle strength, which surrounds the joints in your ankle as well as in your feet. As a result, there is a significant reduction in the prevention of injury.
Jumping rope will help to teach the players to put their weight on their feet balls instead of their heels as the latter option increases their chance of getting injured. As the individuals playing stay on their toes the whole time while rope skipping, it will become easier for them to play different sports like tennis by standing on the balls of their feet.
- It Helps to Burn Calories
Skipping ropes for half an hour burns around 700 calories. This aerobic exercise helps in achieving a burn rate of 1300 calories with vigorous activity, and about 0.1 calories get consumed in each jump. Did you know that ten minutes of doing this activity is approximately equivalent to running a mile for eight minutes? Though it is plausible to burn many calories from jumping one rope, it is not specific enough to aid weight loss in the long run.
If you depend only on skipping rope to burn your calories but still continue towards consuming a diet high in calories, then it wouldn’t be possible for you to lose weight. So, if you are planning to exercise with no plan to cut off your calories, then it will be hard for you to lose weight substantially.
It is best to include a range of different activities as well as rope skipping in your routine in order to optimize your health and fitness. There should be a workout regime that includes Pilates and weight-bearing exercise as well as other strength training exercises.
- Highly Fun and Portable
Unlike other gym equipment, a skipping rope is super easy to carry around. Not only do they consume a minimum space, but also they are super light to carry around. You can roll and tie them with your bicycle on your way to school or take them to your work. You can also warm up prior to your game for basketball or make yourself cool down after riding your bike. You also need to be able to play some tricks and have friendly challenges with your friends and family. Like, challenge them for how long can you guys jump, or how much high can you jump, what’s the spinning time, and all kinds of fun tricks to play with using a jump rope.
- Improvement in Bone Health
Did you know that rope skipping is regarded as one of the best activities to do when it comes to improving bone health? It is so because jumping requires your bones to work against gravity, which helps the bones to get denser than before. In rope skipping, you are jumping up and down at a fast pace, and you are required to work against gravity several times. There is a study that suggests that jumping up and down with ropes 40 times in a week results in a significant increase in bone density after a matter of 6 months. It is again that comes as you hop up and down about 20 to 30 times every week.
- Improvement in Cardio Health
Jumping ropes is also highly important for an overall improvement in aerobic conditioning. For increasing your lung as well as heart health, you need to perform the activity about three to five times a week. This can go for at least about 10 minutes to as much as 20 minutes at one time or session, you may call it.
- Improvement in Efficiency of Breathing
Rope skipping helps to improve how efficiently you take part in breathing. This is one added benefit that comes with rope skipping in addition to an improvement in stamina as well as heart health. It is highly beneficial as you decide to do other kinds of different activities as you wouldn’t be much running out of breath after you run down the court or doing laps of swimming in the pool.
- Improves Your Mental Health
Skipping ropes is a vigorous aerobic exercise that helps to activate your mind and makes you feel relieved from stress and anxiety. This playful activity helps to elevate your mood as you are using most of your major muscles while jumping in the act. What’s more, the activity puts all your attention on your feet and skipping at the right time. This, in return, helps to shift your attention towards the game instead of worrisome thoughts in case of anxiety and stress and negative thoughts in case of depression.
- Improved Cognitive Functioning
Rope skipping helps in making you smarter. Scientifically, skipping rope helps in developing the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. These hemispheres help to enhance the spatial awareness of the mind, help in improving skills for reading, improve memory level, and aids in making you mentally more alert. What’s more, when you jump on your feet over the balls, your mind, as well as your body, make necessary neural muscular adjustments that help in dealing with the imbalances made as a result of continuous jumping. What’s more, we can say that rope skipping helps to improve the overall coordination and dynamic balance in the body, reflexes, muscle endurance, and overall bone density.
- Enhanced Capacity for Staying Calm
As you are working towards your body as well as your brain simultaneously, the individuals who tend to include rope skipping in their routine are relatively calmer than those people who don’t do it. It is considered from a biomechanical point of view. As an individual investigates the depths of the exercise in further detail and sees it through a biomechanical perspective, the things show a composite movement that combines a movement in a circular way through an angular momentum. We can say that the body works like a projectile subject to the different laws governing projectile motion. On the other hand, the rope is a dynamic flywheel that is subjected to the different laws governing rotary movement. The body is inharmonious as well as synchronous coordination for the moves where we get to see different benefits from it.
When you get to improve your ability to do rope skipping, and you are more in sync, then you are able to stay calm in different situations.
As you can see, there are different benefits that you can achieve by including rope skipping in your routine. Be it training for an obstacle course run or be it for achieving better mental coordination and clarity, rope skipping comes with a lot of benefits for you to achieve.
Requirements for Rope Skipping
For beginners, we can say that a beaded rope is a better idea as it is easy to hold the shape and control it as compared to other types of skipping ropes, such as vinyl rope.
You can make adjustments to the skipping rope as you hold the handles and then step on the skipping rope. Then, make the rope short as the ends reach your armpits. You also need to make sure that you are wearing shoes in a fitting manner; for example, cross-training shoes are highly important in this case.
You need to stand on an area with around 10 to 12 inches of space over your head. The surface for the exercise is also highly important. Don’t try jumping on an even surface such as asphalt, concrete, carpet, or grass. As the carpet alleviates the impact, one downside of using carpets as the surface for doing rope skipping is that it grabs the shoes, which can result in injuries, such as a twist in your knee or the ankle. Instead, you can use other materials for doing the exercise, including pieces of plywood, wooden floor, or a type of impact made which is specifically designed for exercise.
How to Do it The Right Way?
If you are not able to jump rope the way you were able to in your second grade, it can be a bit challenging to resume now. First, you want to work with your coordination. At the start, you need to practice the movements of your arm as well as your foot in a separate way. You need to hold the rope handles using one hand and then swing the skipping rope for developing a needed feel of rhythm.
Now, you need to practice your jumping without the rope. Put these two steps together and focus on jumping without a break for a minute.
To gain the best benefits, try including exercises of lower intensity than rope skipping. You will be able to make jumps for significantly longer times. You will not require jumping for about 10 minutes. Instead, try incorporating the activity into an exercise routine of variations.
On the other hand, a high-intensity workout will involve jumping every time the rope gets passed and then slowing down the rope passing speed in between. Here, you need to focus on your target heart rate zone. This will help you gain the most benefit from the activity.
Final Word
Here are some points you need to know about rope skipping – the benefits of rope skipping on health and fitness are quite many, some of which are mentioned in this article.
