Double Under Jump Rope Training

If you’d like me to analyze your technique, check-out the video analysis options at the bottom of the page.

Selecting and Sizing Your Rope

Before we get into it, let’s first talk about what type of rope to use. Really you can use ANY jump rope. Heavier and longer is better for beginners. Heavier will help you feel where the rope is and the rope tension which is crucial to becoming proficient and a little longer will give you a little more margin for error. Of course both of these things will make it slightly harder, but it won’t be too hard to string a bunch of double unders together are you learn. But, as you improve, you’ll want to move to a faster, shorter rope and carry over the techniques learned with the heavier rope.

If you are going to buy just one, here’s the style I recommend looking for and how to size it:

The Double Under Workshop

Double Unders may be one of the most frustrating things to learn, but hang in there because the skill of the double under, once developed, sticks around will extremely minimal practice. When you look around the gym, the difference between those that can’t string them together and those who can string 3 to 50 together is the ladder has spent consistent, dedicated practice time at some point in their life. This usually looks like a month or two of jump roping a lot. Now, the difference between those who can string 3 to 50 and those who can do hundreds, is typically a few things, but practice time isn’t usually the difference between these two groups. It’s usually as simple as efficiency through technique. If your posture, grip, jump, rope swing, is a little off, multiply that by 50-100 and it adds up really fast. You can feel this immediately when we just jump around a bit. And that is where we are going to start. Let’s look at a few different types of jumping mistakes we see in people that make double unders so much harder than they need to be.

Timing your double under practice is key and you may do it differently depending on where you are in your double under journey, but starting out, you’ll want to practice first thing, when you are fresh. You’ll also want to practice every day for a few weeks/months. It doesn’t have to take up a bunch of time, 5 minutes is enough, but if you go ahead and just battle it consistently now, you’ll have the skill forever…

Ok, now lets take a step back and look at bracing your core. If you are flopping around: 1) It will be hard to breathe efficiently, 2) you will not effectively transfer power into the ground, 3) you will be putting undo pressure on your spine, and 4) you will be reinforcing a movement fault that will show up in everything else you do. Remember, with the MovementLink, everything is linked together through posture, the squat, the push-up, and the jump. If we have an issue in one of these, we are going to see it everywhere.

Let’s take a sec to review the get tight checklist and how it relates to double unders. Remember, the difference between elite and just good at double unders is not typically practice time, it’s these little technique things that add up in huge ways.

Most people don’t even give it a thought. However they grabbed the jump rope the first time is how they learn, but, like all movement, there is some simple physics at play. Your grip will make a difference, so it’s worth getting it optimized…

Bounding is just the ability to bounce off of the ground. Most people overlook the issues than inconsistent bounding will cause and they never simplify their practice and make sure they develop control. As you are trying to learn double unders, there are so many moving pieces. Trying to stay tight, gripping in a way that may “feel weird,” trying to just figure out how to spin the rope, and the added shame of getting whipped hard every time you mess up.

Start every warm-up session with 50 to 200 bounds. Practice getting tight, breathing through your belly, and controlling your jump. Over time you’ll develop being able to bound higher and higher under control making the double under bound easier and more efficient.

Practicing you bounding at different heights will lead into better breathing, body positions, running capacity, box jump capacity, and it will provide you with double under choices. We want to have fast and slow double unders to control our breathing. The faster double unders are metabolically harder, but the slower double unders require a slightly higher bound. Just like we have the ability to jog, run, and sprint, it is an extremely powerful tool to have those different gears for double unders too. Doing 100 double unders and getting tired, you should be able to slow down your pace to even it out. Finishing a workout and need to put it all out there, you should be able to sprint double unders. Check-out what different speeds look like:

We start with single unders to develop body position, breathing, a solid, consistent bound, and feeling rope tension, but we can develop some techniques that do not translate to spinning the rope fast enough for double unders. Like without body position and the bound, we need to keep it simple when rotating the rope:

So much control of the double under and the secret to getting to 500+ unbroken is really feeling the rope. Not only do we need tension on the rope to do the movement in the first place, but it’s the moments of losing tension that typically cause people to struggle.

I would LOVE to help you further with Video Analysis!

Quickly identify those little things that are holding you back!