A new comparison study found that teen badminton players who train with a jump rope reacted in about 0.31 seconds — almost twice as fast as non-athlete peers the same age, who averaged 0.49 seconds. The rope group also ran 20 meters more than half a second faster. It's a small study, and it can't prove the rope alone caused the gap. But a gap that size is hard to look past.
What the Study Actually Measured
Researchers split twenty girls under 15 into two groups. Ten were competitive badminton players who'd been skipping rope three times a week, fifteen to twenty minutes a session, for a month before testing. The other ten weren't in any structured sports training at all. Both groups ran a 20-meter sprint and took a whole-body reaction time test — the kind where you have to move the instant a signal fires, no anticipating, no false starts.
This wasn't a before-and-after experiment. Nobody got faster over the course of the study — the researchers just measured two already-existing groups and compared them. That distinction matters, and we'll get back to it.
The Numbers
The rope-trained athletes hit a 20-meter sprint time of 3.77 seconds on average. The non-athlete group averaged 4.40 seconds — more than half a second slower, which is a real margin at that distance. On the reaction test, the athletes clocked in at 0.31 seconds. The non-athletes averaged 0.49 seconds. Both differences were statistically significant, and the reaction time gap in particular wasn't close.
Put plainly: the group that had been skipping rope reacted to a signal in roughly a third of a second. The group that hadn't took nearly half a second — about 58% longer.
A reaction time gap this size isn't a rounding error. It's the difference between getting to the shuttlecock and watching it land.
What This Study Can't Tell You
Here's the honest part, because we're not going to bury it. The ten kids who skipped rope weren't just doing jump rope — they were competitive badminton players with a full training schedule behind them. The ten who didn't skip rope weren't doing any structured training at all. So this study can't isolate the rope from everything else those athletes were doing: the court time, the drills, the general conditioning that comes with being on a team.
That's a real limitation, and it's the difference between "jump rope caused this" and "jump rope is part of a training picture that produces this." We'd rather say that plainly than oversell a twenty-person comparison study as proof of something it didn't test. What it does show is that trained, rope-skipping young athletes reacted dramatically faster than untrained peers — which at minimum says reaction time isn't fixed, and that the kind of training that includes rope work tends to come with sharper reflexes attached.
Why Reaction Time Is Worth Caring About at All
Reaction time isn't just a lab number. It's the gap between a ball leaving someone's hand and your body actually starting to move — in badminton, boxing, basketball, or just stepping off a curb before a car you didn't see coming. Most fitness marketing skips reaction time entirely because it's harder to sell than a six-pack. Treadmills don't train it. Ellipticals don't train it. A jump rope, by its nature, does: every single rep is a tiny reaction-time drill, because the rope is already moving and your feet have to answer it without a pause to think.
That's a different kind of training effect than burning calories, and it's one the fitness industry mostly ignores because it doesn't photograph well.
The Takeaway
Twenty kids isn't a sample size that settles anything on its own. But it's one more data point in a pattern this blog keeps finding: jump rope shows up again and again in research tied to coordination, reflexes, and the kind of fast-twitch readiness that machines built for steady-state cardio simply don't touch. You don't need to be a competitive athlete to want faster reflexes. You just need a rope and the repetition.
Source: The Effectiveness of Jumping Rope Training on the Speed and Reaction of U-15 Female Badminton Players, International Journal of Physical Education and Sport Science (2025).
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