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Climbing a rope

How to Climb a Rope

Joe Justice here and today, I’m going to teach you how to climb a rope. Okay, so first things first, you need to get yourself a good climbing rope, not a battle rope. It needs to be a climbing rope and you can get those gymnastic supply stores. Of course, you can get them online. This one right here is an inch and a half diameter. It’s got these little caps on the end. It’s made out of fiber that can be inside and outside, and it’s got to loop up at the top that you can use to wrap around things like tree branches. You can also get kits that will anchor them into ceilings. So if you have a really high room, you know a 20 foot room or something like that that you can, you can anchor it into the ceiling and that works just great. My rope is 15 feet from the ground to the branch that I’ve got it hanging on.

And before you even attempt climbing, you need to make sure you’ve built the adequate upper body strength. We’re going to do that with a combination of pull ups and chin ups, pull ups are when your palms are away from you and chin ups are when your palms are facing you. Pull up build more of your back in your lats and chin ups build your biceps. So what you should be able to do is at least ten of each, so ten pull ups. And ten chin ups. When you’re able to do ten of each, then you’ve definitely got the upper body strength, you’re going to need to be able to pull off a rope climb. So what do you do if you can’t do any pull ups or chin ups at all or can only do one or two? Go to any sports store and you’ll find some of these? You can even find them in big box stores. They’re everywhere. These are little bands that you can do exercises with. If you get the long ones, you can use them as pull up assist bands and they have different thicknesses. The thicker they are, the more assistance they’ll give you. You just put them around the pull up bar, stick your feet in the loop and then they’ll give you some assistance. Now you want to use as thin a band as possible and then get away from the band as quickly as you can, so once you can do four or five with one thickness, then drop that thickness down and drop the thickness down and drop it down until you’re not using a band at all. If you can do, say, five pull ups and chin ups, then do sets of five. Don’t do sets of ten using a band because the more you do under your own power, the better you’ll get at it and the stronger you’ll get. So, focus on using your own power. Just use the band long enough to get you over the hump to get you the strength that you need to be able to get up to five or six and then start doing them for sets. And otherwise, you’ll never get to a point where you can do 10, 15 reps of free standing pull ups.

Now, the next thing that you’re going to run into is grip strength. That’s really what you need for rope climb and the way we’re going to build up our grip strength is with pull ups again. But we’re going to use towels. I’m going to show you how to do towel pull ups. With towel pull ups you’re going to build that grip strength once you’re able to do ten pull ups, ten chin ups. Your next hurdle is going to be grip strength. You should be able to do five or six pull ups using towels. Let me show you how to do a towel pull up. And once you’re able to do 5, 6 towel pull ups, then the next step is to do some rope pull ups. Let me show you how those work. Rope pull ups are where you really begin to build that strength that you’re going to need to climb the rope. All you got to do is grab the rope, one hand over the other and then just do pull up just like that. Try to get up to five while you’re on the ground and let me show you a little tip that’ll help you out along the way. And that is some chalk you can get chalk at any kind of fitness place. I don’t think the big box stores sell these, but any place that does weightlifting or gymnastics or anything, you get this big block chalk. You don’t need very much. You just take a little tiny bit, rub it between your hands and that’ll make your grip really strong, Okay? It won’t be slippery at all. And then you want to switch your grip just like I did this way before. I’m going to do this way now and I’m going to do five reps. And that is going to build up your strength to be able to actually do that rope climb.

Once you’re able to do the pull ups, work on the towel, pull ups, the chin ups and the rope pull ups. At that point, you have all the strength that you need to be able to do a rope climb. So there’s a little bit of an intimidation factor that you got to deal with. You know, if you’re going up 15 feet, it’s understandable that you get a little scared. You’re afraid that if your grip slip, you’re going to hurt yourself. And that’s totally understandable. Never go outside your comfort zone. Make sure you’re on a soft surface. Don’t do a rope climb over cement, seems like a really bad idea. Put some padding down. But let me also tell you… all you need to do is climb to where you’re comfortable. If you climb hand over hand three or four times, and that’s as high as you want to go and just come on back down and do that for reps. In time, you will get to a point where you can easily climb up and down the rope with no problem. Stay safe. Don’t do anything that’s dangerous at all. Make sure you get a nice soft surface and don’t do it when you’re exhausted, like at the end of the day or something like that. It’s a great exercise for building up your arms and your back when you’re fresh. It’s a good compound movement builds up your entire upper body, so that’s how you climb a rope. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you like and subscribe and watch some more videos. Till next time, take care.

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