If you’ve ever been to a gym, you’ve probably seen someone tossing thick, heavy ropes around. These ropes are known as battle ropes, and many people use them for an intense strength-building and calorie-burning workout. While it may seem easy to swing a rope up and down, you’d be surprised how challenging lifting and moving those heavy ropes can be, especially for more than a few seconds.
The battle rope concept was invented by a well-known fitness trainer named John Brookfield back in 2006. They were originally used as a training method for American football players and Mixed Martial Arts fighters. Heavy ropes have spilled directly into the mainstream of exercise scenes across the globe. This is an effective, affordable, and simple means of improving conditioning. The benefits of rope training include increased power, strength, flexibility, and endurance. The end result of consistent heavy ropes workouts is toned muscles and burned fat. A few whips of these heavy ropes propel one's heart to its maximum rate. This is the type of intense workout just about everyone can benefit from.
1. Explosive Full Body Workout
By nature of design, the exercises you perform with battle ropes work your entire body in a dynamic, explosive manner. Not every piece of fitness equipment can say that. Battle ropes are revered for their strength and conditioning ability. It’s a total body workout for strength, hypertrophy, endurance, power, and cardiovascular health all in one long, thick rope.
2. Quick, Efficient Workouts
Battle rope exercises target multiple muscle groups at once. As such, you burn a lot of calories and work many muscles in a short period of time. Rather than spending a lot of time focusing on isolation exercises or single muscle groups, you can do intense total body exercises with battle ropes and get a more effective all-round workout in a fraction of the time. This is how you get into fantastic shape. Of course, if you want to grow specific muscles, do what you must with dumbbells and the like, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if you want a quick and effective workout, then battle ropes are one of the best training tools that exist for that. After a 20-30 minutes battle rope workout, you will be toast.
3. Get Shredded
While battle ropes can build muscle, there are better training tools for building muscle, but there may be no better implement for burning fat and getting shredded. A battle rope workout or finisher at the end of your workout will allow you to burn a ton of calories in a short period of time. And due to the intensity of the workout, you will achieve the phenomenon known as EPOC (Excessive Post Oxygen Consumption) aka “after burn”, which means your body will burn more calories long after your workout is finished.
4. Great for HIIT Workouts
For HIIT workouts, you really only need your bodyweight. That said, if we had to choose one fitness tool for HIIT, it would be battle ropes. This is because the movements can be super explosive and they simply incorporate so well into HIIT. You could do a HIIT workout with just battle ropes and it’ll be like HIIT on steroids as the battle ropes combine resistance with explosive movements. This is how you burn fat and build muscle at the same time. Moreover, this is how you keep your metabolism through the roof.
5. Cardiovascular Health
Battle rope workouts are cardio times resistance training. It’s like doing a run and a weightlifting session at the same time. As long as you keep your rest time as it should (we will get into how to structure a battle rope workout below), then your heart rate will stay elevated for the length of your battle rope workout. This will boost your cardiovascular health and your endurance, which will translate to better performance both with weightlifting and sports.
Note: people with knee, hip and low back issues love to use battle ropes for cardio as running puts stress on their joints, whereas battle ropes are low impact, and they still give you the same cardiovascular benefits.
