Is jump rope a full body workout?

Jump rope is commonly promoted as a ‘full-body workout’ which targets all the muscles in your body. However, sadly, this is not true. Jump rope is not a full-body workout. If look at the biomechanics in how a person jumps rope, it’s clear that jump rope is predominantly a lower-body workout which targets both the anterior and posterior chain musculature.

The muscles which create the energy to jump are the calves and soleus (in the back of your lower leg), the quadriceps (in the front of the thighs) and the the glutes (your buttocks). These muscles work together to achieve full extension of the knees and ankle to create the jump. Upon landing, these same muscles work in a resisting fashion (known as eccentric) to absorb the impact of the landing. Your tibialis anterior (shin muscles in your lower legs) and your hamstrings (in the back of your thighs) help to stabilise the landing.

Despite the relatively small range of motion the leg muscles are taken through during this movement, the high intensity which comes from such a repetitive explosive movement pattern can lead eventually to hypertrophy - the growing of muscle fibre. So if you’d like to grow your glutes, calves or thighs then jump rope is a fantastic way to supplement any resistance training you may already be doing, but it’s far less productive alone than a progressive overload focused resistance training program.

So if jump rope is primarily a lower-body workout, why does it affect my upper-body so much when I’m jumping? If held and used correctly, a jump rope will do little to challenge the muscles in your arms. Because the rope has angular momentum, the tension it creates is never in the same path as the ‘line of action’ of the biceps or triceps. The line of action is the direction (in space) through which resistance must be applied for a muscle to have to work to resist. Because the tension in a jump rope’s rotation doesn’t achieve this, most of the intense feeling created is from one of two sources. The weight of the rope and the jumper’s grip. If a jumper grips the rope too tightly, this can cause fatigue which can feel analogous to effort, although not in a way which will target the muscles. Imagine holding tightly onto your phone for five minutes straight. This won’t build muscle in your arm but will begin to hurt intensely after a while. This feeling can be exaggerated by the weight of the rope. Simply put, the heavier the rope is, the harder you’ll need to grip it to keep hold of it. This added weight will increase the perceived intensity of the workout, but it will not provide a stimulus to your upper-body muscles which parallels this perceived intensity.

If you’re looking for a way to target specific muscle groups to grow them and facilitate hypertrophy then jump rope is not going to be time-efficient approach. Resistance training with a structure program which enables the tracking of progressive overload will trump any jump rope workout someone promotes. Can jump rope be an excellent cardiovascular training protocol? Yes, absolutely. But is jump rope a full-body workout which can be used to replace a traditional training program comprising resistance training? No, sadly not.