Is Jump Rope Aerobic or Anaerobic?

Aerobic versus anaerobic exercise

Jump rope is a great exercise to fulfill and even exceed various fitness goals. Whether it be weight loss, fat loss, or even gaining muscle mass, jump rope has its place in fitness routines and fitness goals at all levels of experience and interest.

Whether jump rope is aerobic or anaerobic is a question that hinges on the difference between aerobic versus anaerobic exercise. 

Because jump rope is highly versatile compared to most forms of exercise, anyone can use jump rope for both the purpose of aerobic exercise and anaerobic exercise.

Start Jumping:The Difference Between Aerobic and Anaerobic Jump Roping

Human minds tend to think one-dimensionally about things —black-and-white thinking is not as strenuous as the exploration of grey areas in knowledge, so it is easy for us to find ourselves liable to fall into it. 

This is no different regarding our fitness goals —including how we typically regard forms of exercise as either aerobic or anaerobic.

Jump rope can be pinned down neither to aerobics nor anaerobics, as jump roping can be done both aerobically and anaerobically.

Aerobic Exercise Versus Anaerobic Exercise

The key difference between aerobic versus anaerobic exercise is how it affects our heart rate during exercise, which essentially depends on whether or not the exercise being done is high intensity and the period of time spent exercising. 

Aerobic exercise ranges from low-intensity walks to moderately intense endeavors (e.g., running). Typically, aerobic exercise requires extended periods of time to complete, with a heart rate that could be high enough to signal exerted effort but not high enough to make speaking too tricky.

Aerobic exercises of moderate intensity are also commonly high impact exercises —exercises that involve repeating the same motion over and over again, to the increased probability of experiencing a considerable detriment to one’s joint health.

Anaerobic exercise, by contrast, is usually so intense as to make it impossible to speak while performing. The period of time that anaerobic exercise takes is likewise considerably shorter than that of aerobic exercise —a full-intensity 1-rep-max deadlift, for example, takes roughly 5 seconds to complete.

Jump Rope Aerobics

Using a jump rope for aerobic exercise boils down to finding a pace that is manageable enough to hold for extended periods of time.

Picture, for example, being back in childhood and doing double-dutch for 10-minutes straight: now that’s an aerobic exercise!

If you can jump rope for a solid 10-minute stretch with little or no interruption, you’ve got yourself a useful aerobics exercise on jump rope —and the key to progressing on such aerobic activities is to increase the amount of time you can jump rope for with no interruptions.

Jump Rope Anaerobics

Most users of jump ropes in gyms use them anaerobically. Boxers, for example, typically do high-intensity intervals of jump roping, which includes short bursts of jump roping as fast as possible, followed by periods of rest in between.

There is potential to gain muscle mass from jump rope by using it for anaerobic exercise. Weightlifting is but one form of anaerobic exercise that builds muscle.

According to a 2017 study from the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, “HIIT may be an effective exercise modality to [positively] influence muscle size in overweight and obese individuals.”

The underlying mechanism here is that HIIT places “high tensile stress on skeletal muscle” in ways that highly resembles traditional resistance training, as noted in a 2021 research review from the journal Sports Medicine.

That specific research review noted that more scientific inquiry needs to be done to know whether this has any marked effects on non-obese and non-overweight populations and also populations at risk for muscle loss, such as the elderly, who also seem to show a positive muscle mass increase from HIIT exercise.

Given the ability to use jump rope for HIIT, and the potential for HIIT to improve muscle mass, jump rope, therefore, has the potential to improve muscle mass —albeit, to an extent that is rather ambiguous.