Battling Ropes: Can Rope Replace Gym?

Battling ropes training puts both strength and speed to the ultimate test. This high-intensity workout helps you reach your maximum heart rate quickly and revs your metabolism. The routine effectively engages the entire upper-body and core muscles. It not only increases arm and hand strength but also improves speed and balance. The nature of battling ropes training is fast and intense, raising your heart rate to the max very quickly. In as little as 15 minutes, you’ll be burning hundreds of calories.

The Battling Ropes system is an easy to implement, highly effective form of training and conditioning for athletes and general fitness enthusiasts alike. Battling Ropes drills will improve grip strength, improve your ability to create power and sustain the power output for longer periods of time, improve your aerobic and anaerobic capacity, teach the muscles of the entire body to work together to maximise performance, and add a fun new twists to your workout.

There have been hundreds of exercises created as well as many more variations. Drills may be performed independently or with a partner. Traditional strength exercises like pressing and squatting drills may be performed as well as exercises unique to the ropes themselves. The wave system drills are a good example. The athlete doubles a length of 20m rope around a pole or immovable object creating two 10m lengths. Holding an end in each hand the athlete swings the rope up and down creating large waves in the rope. This sounds like nothing but I guarantee 99% of you reading this would have quite a bit of trouble lasting a mere 30 seconds! It's that tough!

Granted I don't think Battling Ropes will ever replace barbells and dumbbells, but in my opinion they deserve a spot right next to them and make an excellent addition to any strength training and conditioning program. Just ask any of my athletes who are lucky (or unlucky, depending on if you ask them or me) enough to have this method as part of their training arsenal.

So, the question is whether you’re ready to lose weight, get stronger and get in the best shape of your life? Yes. Get ready for Battling Ropes. Prepare for mind blowing gains of strength, stamina, and power. Battling Ropes is a no impact, kick butt, fast and furious, high velocity, pure adrenal surge functional training workout! You have never experienced a cardio workout at this level.


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Skill Is Not Enough

Surely the average club sportsman doesn't require a fitness program - even those with ambitions of winning competitions? 

After all... Sportsmen aren't athletes... right?

Make no mistake - Sportsmen (at any level) ARE athletes, I am yet to find a sport that doesn’t require a great deal of athleticism.

Strength, power, flexibility, balance, core stability, body awareness, endurance... they're all physical traits that every consistent sportsman (even the fair-weather players) must possess.

The sports industry is littered with gadgets and gimmicks for increasing performance. Yet for all their claims and guarantees most remain independently unproven. Compare that to a basic fitness or sports conditioning program...

I’ll use Golf as an example. After 5 weeks of completing 15 minutes of very simple home exercises 5 times a week, golfers increased their club head speed by an average of 24%. While it could be argued that club head speed is only one small facet of a golfer's overall game, it is highly correlated with a player's handicap. In other words, the lower a player's handicap is, the higher their club head speed at impact tends to be. In fact, a 24% increase relates to a reduction of 4 shots off a golfer's handicap. This is just one of several studies that proves the benefits of conditioning for golf.

For the more serious sportsmen, conditioning can no longer be seen as an unnecessary add-on to their practise routine. Just as a committed amateur athlete spends time on their technique AND their fitness, so must the sportsman who demands to be the best they can. There is a caveat however...

In order to improve performance in any sport, training must be specific to the demands of the game involved. 

Of the few sportsmen who do appreciate the importance of physical training (sadly it is only very few), most still make the mistake of following a general fitness routine.

If you want to consistently perform at a higher level, you need to take a different approach. Not a more complicated approach and not a more time-consuming approach, a more specific approach.