Rope climbing exercises are an excellent way to improve grip, strength, and conditioning. Learn how to rope climb properly from a professional trainer in this workout video.
Anchor feet
5 up, 5 down
Pull with arms
Use feet
Michael Rosengart is a professional fitness trainer in Santa Monica, California.
Off-season training for football: The rope climb. This is the third exercise in our second super set. What we're working on right now is rope climb. It's basically a very, very good strength and conditioning exercise that will work well into the super set. Okay, so what [PH] Jonesy's going to do is he's going to demonstrate the super set. He's going to anchor his feet and then he's going to work up. The way we're working on right now is just 10 climbs, so five for each hand so five up, five down [DEMONSTRATING]. What he's doing is that he's using one arm pulling it up and then pulling himself back down. He's coming back down and each one coming down counts as a rep too, so we're going to do 20 all together. So it's going to be 10 up, 10 down. Good [DEMONSTRATING]. This is a very strong and powerful exercise to work with. We're going to talk about anchoring as well for safety reasons. When you anchor, what you're going to do, you don't take the side of your foot, you're going to press out against the rope and then bring the other foot underneath and then you're going to step on top of it. You're placing the rope on top of the shoelace part of your foot so that you're stable, and that's going to allow you to hold there still. This is a very, very heavy duty exercise so you want to make sure that you're strong and stable before you begin. So Jonesy's going to finish up his set here, and I'm only just take a moment to say that not every gym has a rope and not every person has access to rope. So if you don't have a rope, then work on a pull-down machine with a closed-grip handle so that your hands are close together. That will simulate this exercise as best as possible [DEMONSTARTING], and again [INDISCERNIBLE] we're doing 10 strokes up and 10 strokes down. You don't need to do all 10 straight up and all 10 straight down. You could do two up, two down, or four up and four down, whatever, but it's going to be 10 up then 10 down and then we'll move on to the last exercise in the super set.
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