Which muscles does jump rope target?

Jump rope is commonly promoted as a ‘full-body workout’ that targets all your body's muscles. However, sadly, this is not true. Jump rope is not a full-body workout. If you look at the biomechanics of 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 primary action in jump rope is bounding. This is where the person ballistically (explosively) jumps up and down on the balls of their feet without letting their heels touch the ground in between reps.

The muscles which create the energy to bound are the calves and soleus, the quadriceps and 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 and your hamstrings help to stabilise the landing.

Despite the relatively small range of motion, the leg muscles are taken through during bounding, the high intensity which comes from such a repetitive explosive movement pattern can lead eventually to hypertrophy - the growth of muscle fibre. So if you’re 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. 

So if jump rope is primarily a lower-body workout, why does it affect my upper body so much when I’m jumping? There are a couple of ways to answer this question.

The first thing to consider, like with our lower body, is what’s happening on a biomechanical level. 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 through which resistance must be applied for a muscle to have to work to resist. This is the basic principle of how reps with weights work. 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 similar 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.

The second thing to consider is a person’s blood pressure. Because of the arms’ proximity to the heart, a jumper can create a larger spike in blood pressure by holding objects under tension for extended periods of time. This is partially how weighted ropes can create such a pump in a jumper’s arms when used; despite the weight of the rope having absolutely no effect on the intensity of the lower-body workout that jumping rope provides.

If you’re looking for a way to target specific muscle groups to grow them and facilitate hypertrophy then jumping rope is not going to be the time-efficient approach. Resistance training with a structured 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. Can jump rope be used to supplement an existing training program for additional volume in the lower body? Yes, again! Is jump rope a full-body workout which can jump rope used to replace a traditional training program comprising resistance training? Sadly not.