A Double Jump Start on the Season

If there's any piece of equipment you should keep in your gear bag, it should be a jump rope.  At my high school, jumping rope was always a part of warm-ups before practice, and since 2006 I've always had one in the bag that I take to practice and tournaments.  It is part of my routine before matches, and I sometimes use it as a great substitute for running.

Being that I can complete over 150 skips in a minute, I thought I was a decent jump roper, until someone recently had me do "double unders," or as I call them, "Rocky's," from the training scene in Rocky IV where Rocky Balboa does two rotations per jump.  In high school I would occasionally throw in a couple Rocky's at the end of the "tricksters" portion of our warm-up, but I was thrown for a loop when I was asked to do 50 of them.  At first I couldn't do more than a couple in a row, and so I was told to do 200 normal jumps instead.  Two hundred in place of fifty double skips sounds like twice as much work, but when you do fifty Rocky's you'll realize that the 200 regulars is easier.

One workout that I've often done when in a time crunch is one minute of forward jumping, one minute of backward, one minute on one foot, one minute on the other, and then one minute of tricksters, with thirty seconds of rest between rounds.  Before I would usually just do criss-crosses for the tricksters, but now Rocky's will become a staple in my conditioning.  They get me panting many times faster than traditional jump roping, and I recommend doing some to get your heart rate up before matches.

Jump to it,
Jeff