In Pavels book PTTP he says you can do skipping (Jump Rope) for your Cardio, along side your press and Deadlift,
My question is how would you program the Skipping these days?
Are you new to skipping or already experienced and looking for programming ideas?
I recently (a few months) started doing a lot of rope skipping for cardio and really enjoying it. I don't program it systematically. My session times vary from 10 minutes to over 45 minutes, depending on my schedule and how I feel, and I use a variety of work/rest schemes; I'm always experimenting and changing up my work/rest schemes for variety, to see how different schemes feel, and to provide some general progression over time.
I started with :30/:30, and I still use that scheme for long easy sessions, but my work times go up to 2:00 and my work:rest ratios go from 1:1 to 3:1. I'm also experimenting with using side swings to break up longer continuous sets. Basically, I just try to keep the overall effort easy to moderate.
Due to some chronic ankle injuries from basketball, I can only really jump off two feet and am somewhat limited in the continuous time I can jump. But I've found that rope skipping is very low impact (you just have to jump high enough to clear the rope, which is less than a centimeter), and much more tolerable for me than running, which I really can't do at all, or even walking (although I can do Nordic walking with poles to provide some deloading to my ankles, plus upper body involvement).
Because of my injuries, I'm very limited in the kind of footwork I can do. But learning tricks is great because it gives you something to concentrate on and play around with, adds some movement variety to skipping -- and missing while learning new skills provides natural rest breaks.
