Want to give your strength & conditioning a serious boost? Then you need to start training with battle ropes. There’s a reason why battle ropes have quickly become one of the most popular training tools for workout enthusiasts and athletes alike. They offer a wealth of benefits that will improve both your body composition and performance in sports, fitness, and daily life.
Battle ropes, which are also known as battling ropes or heavy ropes, are a fitness training implement used to improve strength and conditioning. As the name suggests, it is a rope, but it is not just any rope. The rope is thick, heavy, and long, giving it significant resistance and movability.
Generally speaking, battle ropes can be purchased in three lengths - 30, 40 or 50 feet, and 1.5” and 2” in thickness. For a 30 foot battle rope, you would have approximately 15 feet of rope in each hand as it would be anchored at the middle and pulled evenly to each side.
Nowadays, you will see battle ropes in pretty much every single commercial gym around the world. Why? Because it is a highly effective and efficient training tool for full body workouts.
So, are battle ropes worth buying? The answer is a resounding yes for those who want to get into killer shape. If you still aren’t sure, it’s time to present to you all of the incredible benefits of battle rope workouts...
11 BENEFITS OF BATTLE ROPES
Battle ropes offer a wide variety of benefits for people of all fitness levels. Let’s go over some of our favorite benefits of battle ropes.
1. Explosive Full Body Workout
By nature of design, the exercises you perform with battle ropes work your entire body in a dynamic, explosive manner. Not every piece of fitness equipment can say that.
Battle ropes are revered for their strength and conditioning ability. It’s a total body workout for strength, hypertrophy, endurance, power, and cardiovascular health all in one long, thick rope.
2. Quick, Efficient Workouts
Battle rope exercises target multiple muscle groups at once. As such, you burn a lot of calories and work many muscles in a short period of time. Rather than spending a lot of time focusing on isolation exercises or single muscle groups, you can do intense total body exercises with battle ropes and get a more effective all-round workout in an a fraction of the time. This is how you get into fantastic shape.
3. Get Shredded
While battle ropes can build muscle, there are better training tools for building muscle, but there may be no better implement for burning fat and getting shredded. A battle rope workout or finisher at the end of your workout will allow you to burn a ton of calories in a short period of time. And due to the intensity of the workout, you will achieve the phenomenon known as EPOC (Excessive Post Oxygen Consumption) aka “after burn”, which means your body will burn more calories long after your workout is finished.
4. Great for HIIT Workouts
For HIIT workouts, you really only need your bodyweight. That said, if we had to choose one fitness tool for HIIT, it would be battle ropes. This is because the movements can be super explosive and they simply incorporate so well into HIIT. You could do a HIIT workout with just battle ropes and it’ll be like HIIT on steroids as the battle ropes combine resistance with explosive movements. This is how you burn fat and build muscle at the same time. Moreover, this is how you keep your metabolism through the roof.
5. Cardiovascular Health
Battle rope workouts are cardio times resistance training. It’s like doing a run and a weightlifting session at the same time. As long as you keep your rest time as it should (we will get into how to structure a battle rope workout below), then your heart rate will stay elevated for the length of your battle rope workout. This will boost your cardiovascular health and your endurance, which will translate to better performance both with weightlifting and sports.
6. Balance, Coordination & Stability
Because your arms are working independently of each other, your core, glutes, legs and back will need to work to stabilize your movements. If not, the ropes will control you, not the other way around. With that, your balance and coordination will improve greatly, especially if you have muscle imbalances, as those will be corrected by the unilateral nature of the movements.
So, if you want to gain a solid stance and improve your balance and coordination, battle ropes are a magnificent implement to do so. The best part is, you can always continue improving in these areas with different dynamic variations of battle rope exercises and more explosiveness movements. The added benefit of all this is a rock solid, washboard core and firm glutes.
7. Improve Muscles Imbalance and Weak Areas
Battle ropes will make muscle imbalances and weak muscles apparent really quickly. What’s even better is, they will improve them quickly too, and you don’t really need to think too much about it. Just go about the workout and your weaker side will catch up and those smaller, often forgotten muscles like your grip, forearms, and hip flexors will be targeted no matter what you do. Just make sure you keep good form and work hard.
8. Durability via Increased Mobility & Stability
Durability, which is your injury resilience, comes down to strength, mobility and stability. With battle ropes, you are improving all three areas, and in turn, your durability as well.
You get a boost in mobility as battle rope exercises will move through full ranges of motion, so any restricted areas like hips or shoulders will gradually open up.
As for stability, we discussed that. Your core, along with your entire kinetic chain is working hard to stabilize your body during battle rope exercises. Dynamic movements like this offer so many more advantages than simple isolation exercises. Stability and mobility is a crucial one.
9. Work Your Muscles in New Ways & Break Plateaus
Battle ropes offer a new way to work your muscles. It is constant, dynamic and explosive movement that fights both gravity and force created by moving the ropes. This will shock your muscles, many of which you don’t even think of in your normal routine, and this exactly what the body needs to continue improving. Moreover, this is how you move on from monotonous routines and break plateaus. Battle ropes will improve your work capacity, endurance, and speed, allowing you to perform better in other areas of your fitness and in sports.
10. High Intensity, Low Impact
While battle rope workouts are high intensity, they are low impact. The workout will allow you to build muscle and strength without pressure on your joints like most free weights cause. This means you can get great results without the risk of injury. In fitness, high reward and low risk is the perfect recipe for the longevity of positive results.
11. Mental Fortitude
High intensity workouts are undoubtedly great for your body, but they are also great for your mind. It builds mental toughness that will translate to all areas of fitness and life. After a serious battle rope workout, you will never look at a medium intensity weight lifting session the same again. That’ll be fun and games compared to even just a 10 minute battle rope finisher. This kind of mental fortitude is what builds winners on all fronts. It enables you to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. You’ll soon find yourself pushing harder in all areas of your training.
