Exercise : Jumping rope

Rope exercises can often be boring and useless; Thanks to the rope, we train all the muscles of our body: in addition to the legs and buttocks, the abdomen, the arms, the shoulders and the chest are also involved.

Certainly, the workout should be gradual, respecting breathing times. But with this kind of exercise, we could easily get great results in a short time. Let’s see then how to practice well with the jump with the rope.

Before starting the exercise we must verify that the length of the rope is suitable for our height. To do this, we block the center of the rope with your feet and pull it along our body: if the rope reaches the chest height, then the length is right, otherwise it is too long and shortened.

That’s what we are doing. For a good exercise, it will be necessary to timing the running time: with about 15 minutes of exercise, we will burn from 150 to 200 kcal. The first times you will have to get used to synchronizing the jump with the movement of the rope and our breathing. Before we start to remember, also do some stretching.

The basic exercise is obviously to skip the rope or to join feet or to alternate your feet by pulling on your knees. Once we have reached a certain degree of familiarity with the basic exercise, we can gradually increase the difficulty.

For example, we can make a double skin, that is to make the rope swirl faster so that we can skip two rope laps with one single jump. Or, when the rope is up to our head, we cross our hands to skip the rope when our arms are crossed.

We can also skip the rope while we run: in this case, we obviously jump on alternate foot, bringing another foot a further, at a distance of about 40-50 cm, raising the knees to the chest as much as possible. If we cannot skip for the first time for 15 minutes, we can make 3 minute reps each plus one minute of pause.

The more we go in the workout, the more we will be able to stretch the time of exercise: the ideal would be 20 minutes.Lastly, let’s remember that we can increase the difficulty, shortening the length of the rope a bit: in this way, you will have to make higher jumps, and you will need to raise your knees more.