Can Jump Rope Help Get a 6 Pack?

What do most of us want from working out and doing exercise? That coveted chiseled stomach with a 6 pack. I know I am guilty of setting this as a goal and sometimes doing the wrong things to get there. We’ll break down one of the biggest myths and what to do instead along with how jump rope can help achieve this goal!

Let’s first of all debunk the biggest myth of achieving the 6 pack - do as many crunches as possible!

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A big no no to reach this goal. Doing crunches will definitely help you build some ab muscles but it will specifically be the top abs. On top of this, doing just crunches will not make your 6 pack visible. Instead of focusing on just doing as many crunches as possible, you need to focus on your core and how to make all of it stronger.

This means working your

  • upper abs

  • lower abs

  • obliques

  • full core

There are many exercises that will help you target all of these muscles - some of our favourites are

  • weighted crunches and iron butterfly for the upper abs

  • hanging leg raises and normal leg raises for the lower abs

  • Russian twists and bicycle crunches for obliques

  • plank and bear crawl plank for full core

Now that you know the real exercises that will actually build the 6 pack, let’s get to how you can make it visible for the world to see!

The only way to make that 6 pack visible is to burn the fat that we have on our stomach. This doesn’t mean you need to get down to 5% body fat (definitely not the healthiest situation to be in) but you do need to focus on bringing down your general body fat percentage. It is said that the ab muscles are made visible around the 17% mark for men and 24% for women, but can definitely vary from person to person.

What people usually don’t understand is that there is no way to just burn belly fat. You need to work on bringing down your overall body fat percentage. There are two ways to do this:

  • building more muscle to bring the overall percentage of fat down

  • or doing cardio that will actually burn the fat and bring down the percentage

If only we could kill two birds with one stone with an exercise that can do both of these things for us… oh wait, WE DO!!

Let me introduce JUMP ROPE!

We have already mentioned in different blog posts how it can do both of these things. You can find how it helps build muscle here and why jump rope is the best cardio exercise here. Let’s do a quick breakdown of how jump rope achieves both.

Building Muscle

We know that jump rope helps build muscle in our legs as we are continuously jumping. However, many people do not know that jump rope also builds a ton of muscle in our upper body. We engage our whole arms and upper body to spin the rope around us and we engage and work our core to keep us stable and strong. Plus, every time the rope spins around, it is another repetition working every muscle.

Burning Fat

The way to burn fat is to burn calories and be in a calorie deficit - meaning you burn more calories in a day than you take in. Cardio is an exercise that raises your heart rate to points where you are burning calories rapidly. Jump rope is known to be the form of cardio that burns the most calories in relation to time and the nature of starting and stopping adds in a factor where you are doing High Intensity Interval Training which has been shown to burn even more calories.

The Verdict

We have gone through what the biggest myth does and how to replace that myth and also shown why jump rope can be a secret weapon that not many people know about to get that 6 pack.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and Live.Breathe.JUMP your way to a 6 pack!!

Tiago Moreira-Rato