Jump rope measurably lowered anxiety and depression scores in students locked in their dorms during a COVID quarantine — but it wasn't the winner. A simple bodyweight circuit of squats, jumps, and burpees beat it. Rope skipping still crushed doing nothing.
The Study: Locked In, Working Out
In late 2022, students at Henan University in China got quarantined in their dorms. No gym. No outside. Just a room and a phone. Researchers used the moment to run a real experiment: could exercise, done entirely online through an app, actually move the needle on anxiety and depression during a genuinely stressful lockdown?
Out of more than a thousand students screened, the researchers landed on small groups with measurable anxiety or depression at the start — the kind of numbers that matter, not just "feeling a little off." Students picked one of three workouts, done three times a week for three weeks over Zoom: rope skipping in short intervals, a bodyweight aerobic circuit (squats, side rolls, jumps, burpees), or a resistance circuit (squats, sit-ups, push-ups, planks). A fourth group did nothing and acted as the control.
What Actually Happened to Their Anxiety and Depression
Every single exercise group got better. The group that did nothing got slightly worse. That part isn't close — it's the kind of result you'd expect, and it held up here too.
But the three workouts didn't help equally. The bodyweight aerobic circuit lowered anxiety and depression scores more than either rope skipping or the resistance circuit. Rope skipping and the resistance circuit landed in a statistical tie with each other — both clearly ahead of doing nothing, neither one ahead of the other.
Three weeks of jump rope beat sitting in a room doing nothing. It just didn't beat squats and burpees.
Why the Circuit Might Have Won
The aerobic group's workout packed in more movement variety — squats, side rolls, jumps, and burpees — in longer sets than the rope-skipping group's intervals. More total body involvement, more novelty, possibly more perceived effort in a short window. The researchers didn't measure exactly why one beat the other; they just measured that it did, and said so plainly in their own conclusion.
That's worth sitting with. A lot of fitness content picks one workout, decides it's the best, and builds a whole narrative around it. This study didn't do that. Rope skipping worked. It just wasn't the top performer in this particular three-week window.
The Catch This Study Doesn't Hide
Here's the part that matters if you're going to trust this at all: students picked their own workout. Nobody got randomly assigned. That means the people who chose rope skipping might have been a different kind of person than the people who chose burpees — more or less anxious to begin with, more or less motivated, more or less used to the movement. The researchers don't flag this as a limitation themselves, but it's a real gap, and it's one you should know about before you read too much into the ranking.
It's also a short study — three weeks, one Chinese university, one lockdown. That's not nothing, but it's not a verdict on jump rope and mental health forever, either.
So Should You Jump Rope for Anxiety?
Based on this study alone: yes, if the alternative is doing nothing. No, if you're trying to pick the single most effective workout for mental health from a list of three, because the data says a basic bodyweight circuit edged it out. Most people aren't choosing between rope skipping and a burpee circuit in a locked dorm room, though — they're choosing between a workout they'll actually do and one they won't. On that measure, having a rope that takes up no space and needs no gym still wins by default.
Source: Zhang, Y., Wen, Z., Li, J., Shi, Y., & Meng, S. (2023). "The influences of dormitory exercise on negative emotions among quarantined Chinese college students during the COVID-19 pandemic." Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1243670. Also available via PMC (National Library of Medicine).
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