The 5 Reasons Jump Rope is Incredible for You
When we think about something being good for us, we tend to automatically think about how it will affect our health. Jump rope is an exercise that you will have to add into your training plan when you hear everything it can do for you… get ready:
Burns loads of calories
Helps grow muscle
Improves heart health
Improves your coordination
Reduces your risk of injury
Let’s go one by one breaking down and understanding how jump rope helps us in each of these advantages.
1) Burns loads of calories
Jump rope has been proven to be one of the best exercises when it comes to burning calories in relation to time. A 15 minute jump rope workout can burn anywhere between 150-300 calories depending on your intensity. Think of that for a second, that is the equivalent to 600-1200 calories in an hour! Now I am not saying you should jump rope for one hour straight (even jumping for 5 minutes straight is quite difficult!). But, you can achieve these results by having a good workout set out with bursts of jump rope with set rest periods in between. From personal experience and to use an example, here is a workout I did by jumping rope for 45 seconds with 15 seconds rest period in between - 43 minutes and burned 516 calories, the equivalent to 732 calories in an hour! Next time I need to bring up that intensity! Send us your workout breakdown and let’s compare!
2) Helping to grow muscle
There is a lot of technical terms when it comes to this, like myofibrils, sarcomeres, motor neurons and sarcoplasmic reticulum, confusing. Let’s make it simple though. For your muscles to grow they need to be put into tension that they are not generally accustomed to (to break down muscle fibers) and must be given time to rest so they can repair the “broken” fibers. With jump rope, muscles all over your body, including your calves, quads, forearms, biceps, shoulders, back and many more, are in constant tension and “relax” while spinning the rope around you, jumping up and down. The act of jumping rope is creating that tension and break down allowing space for growth when you rest afterwards. Another factor into just how much break down you can get depends on the weight of the jump rope you use! Something interesting to look into for even more muscle growth. All in all, jump rope should definitely be in your arsenal for muscle growth!
3) Improving heart functionality
The heart is the most important muscle in our body! It beats about 100,000 times per day, allowing 13,500 liters (3600 gallons) of blood to be transported around 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels. That’s bonkers if you ask me because that is two and half times around the Earth!! It’s safe to say that it’s importance is very high. Being a muscle, it needs to be exercised like our other muscles. This means putting some tension on it so it can work to become stronger and healthier. To tense our heart muscle we need to raise our heart rate and get it pumping. How do we do this? Moving our bodies! You can see from the photo of my 43 minute workout that my heart rate was going up and down, jumping and resting. This graph shows that doing a Jump Rope workout really puts that healthy tension on our hearts to make it stronger and improves its health overall.
4) Improving your Coordination
Take a moment to think how much coordination you need for jump rope. You need to swing a rope around your full body and jump at the exact moment when the rope is going to hit your feet. Once you practice and have the Regular Bounce nailed down, you can move onto more advanced tricks needing even more coordination like the Jumping Jack Bounce, the Toe Taps or the Double Unders. These different and advanced tricks will elevate your coordination throughout your whole body to a new level. Are you ready to become a Coordination Ninja?
5) Reducing your Risk of Injury
Who ever said, “I want to get injured really badly!!!” Exactly… no one! Luckily, and as a bi product of improving your coordination, jump rope reduces the risk you will get injured. It makes sense when you consider everything, if you improve your coordination you have fewer chances of getting hurt doing other exercises or your day to day activities. When your upper and lower body are in sync like they need to be for jump rope, you become as agile as a cat and become less injury prone.
If this list does not convince you that jump rope is a super exercise that we should all start using in our training, then all I can say is go give it a try and let me know what your verdict is!
Now get out there and LIVE.BREATHE.JUMP!