Battle Rope Exercises: How To, Benefits, Workout
Have you ever walked into a gym and seen a battle rope curled up in the corner and wondered why that is and what battle rope exercises you can do? First, it’s another tool in your toolbox when it comes to your conditioning. Second, it’s not designed to tie you in knots. Ropes were used by the Egyptians to pull heavy objects long ago, while they were around 4000-3500 BC. built the pyramids. Talk about a back-breaking workout.
Then a gentleman named John Brookfield, a celebrated fitness inventor and strongman, saw the great potential of these heavy, thick ropes and developed a battle rope system to improve strength and conditioning.
Since 2010, Brookfield has taught his system to athletes, professional sports teams and fitness summits around the world. Now you can get a piece of it here. Battle Ropes can give you a high-intensity, low-impact workout, and they will challenge your endurance, conditioning and grip strength all at once.
Here we cover the benefits of battle rope training, five great exercises, and a HIIT workout that’ll get you sweating and smiling in no time.
Benefits of Battle Rope Exercises
Battle ropes offer benefits for people of all fitness levels. They’re easy to set up, easy to use, require minimal training, and get your heart rate up without having to step on those boring cardio machines. Here are some other fantastic benefits of incorporating battle ropes into your workout.
- Improved Balance and Stability: When you do these battle rope exercises, you’re working unilaterally, and your upper and lower body are working overtime to stabilize you and keep both feet on the ground.
- Low Impact, High Intensity: Battle ropes are a tool that places the main focus on your upper body rather than your lower body. The rhythmic nature of most fight rope exercises gets your heart rate up without the combined effect of many other cardiovascular activities.
- Increased grip strength: Gripping the thick battle rope improves your grip strength as the width and weight of the rope forces your forearms and hands to work harder to hold on to the rope.
- Strength & Condition: Heavy Battle Rope Training is a unique blend of strength and cardiovascular training. Performing these exercises for time and reps with proper rest between sets will keep your heart rate elevated throughout the workout. And you’re training fast-twitch muscle fibers, which have better strength and muscle-building potential than slow-twitch muscle fibers.
Battle Rope Workout Routine
With the 5 battle rope exercises below, you can do a HIIT workout at the end of your strength training routine to improve your conditioning and burn some fat.
Tabata Training: Take any of the 5 exercises above and do it with all your might for 20 seconds, then rest for 10 seconds. Do 6 to 8 intervals. If you’re doing more than one exercise, rest for two to three minutes before continuing.
30/30 battle rope training
Here you perform a battle rope exercise for 30 seconds, resting the 30 seconds before moving on to the next. Follow this sequence for 10 minutes and then collapse.
- power slam 30 seconds
- Rest 30 seconds
- bilateral wave 30 seconds
- Rest 30 seconds
- Slam from side to side 30 seconds
- Rest 30 seconds
- Alternating Waves with Get-Up 30 seconds
- Rest 30 seconds
- in and out wave
- Rest 30 seconds
- Repeat for a total of 2 rounds and 10 minutes
5 Battle Rope Exercises to Improve Your Strength and Conditioning
Here are five simple, but not easy, variations of battle rope exercises to improve your strength and conditioning while keeping you from the dreadmill boredom.