If you want to improve your hockey fitness, then get yourself a simple jump rope. It is a low cost, portable and highly effective piece of equipment. Jumping rope is a great cardio workout, but has the added benefit of improving coordination and foot speed (especially the way we do it at HockeyOT.com). A good plastic speed rope will cost you approximately $5-15. If you are going to be away from your local training facility for a period of time, the rope is easy to pack along.

Jumping rope is easy to add to any workout. Usually we will have the athlete do 3-8 sets of 45-60 seconds of jump rope drills with the same length of rest between each set. It can even be used between sets of a strength training exercise to keep the heart rate at a certain level (this is a great weight loss strategy). In a recent study, adding the jump rope between strength training sets has been shown to improve muscle recovery.

If you think jumping rope is just for kids on the playground, I challenge you to try this workout. We use this for all of our hockey players and it’s called the 3D jump rope sequence. The videos below are levels 1 & 2. The highest difficulty level is a 10.

Warning: As with any exercise make sure your physician has cleared you for vigorous activity.

Perform each of these drills for 15 seconds, getting as many jumps as you can.

• 2 foot jump
• jumping jax
• scissors