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Why Can’t You Increase Your Jump Rope Speed?

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Jump rope is an excellent exercise for losing weight, improving your coordination and muscle strength. After experiencing several basic levels, you’d like to try a higher speed in order to enhance the difficulty and to achieve a larger variety of drills. But, you find yourself stuck in a bottleneck and is unable to increase your jump rope speed. Why is this happening? What are the contributing factors to increasing speed? What can we do to accelerate? Here are several points you should bear in mind!

1. Type of ropes

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As there are many different kinds of ropes in the market used for different purposes, how do you know which rope to choose? For instance, beaded ropes produce sounds when hitting the floor, so they can actually help you find the rhythm while jumping rope. As for speed rope, they are literally designed for speed. Speed ropes allow you to do more advanced drills that require higher speed. However, they are usually used by professional athletes since they have better control of the rope. Eventually, when you have reached higher difficulty levels and have better control of the rope, you can try to increase your speed with a speed rope! It will definitely be much easier when turning the rope as it’s usually lighter in weight.

2. Length of rope

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A shorter rope would be better for speed and easier for you to pick up the pace as less effort is required to turn the rope. As suggested by The Athlete Program, you can measure the right length by standing on the rope with one foot and pulling the handles up. The highest point of the handles shouldn’t go beyond your armpits. Please note that this is just general advice, you will have to adjust by taking into consideration your skill level. As for longer ropes, more energy is required to turn the rope because there is excess rope. If your legs are moving fast but your arm movements can’t catch up with it, you will most likely trip over. Therefore, making it harder for you to increase your speed.

3. Leg Position

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Film yourself when you are jumping rope to check if you have kicked your feet back. If so, remind yourself consciously each time when you jump rope! You may not have noticed this when you were jumping with a normal length rope because the rope was long enough to pass through your feet. However, when we use a shorter rope for higher speed, we might trip over it due to our kicked feet.

Bend your knees while jumping. Your heels should not be touching the ground. Your toes should be pushing off the ground. This can effectively lower the chance of tripping over the rope when you are jumping at a higher speed!

4. Hand Position

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Hand position also matters when it comes to increasing speed in jump rope. Consistency plays a crucial role here. If your hand position is inconsistent, you may get tripped over easily. To prevent that, keep your hands still in front of your hips. Draw smaller circles while jumping because the smaller circle you draw, the quicker you can go.  

One thought on “Why Can’t You Increase Your Jump Rope Speed?

  1. Rina says:

    For bengginer which one skipping rope are suitable

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