A 12-week controlled study found that jump rope training alone — no planks, no crunches, no core-specific work of any kind — significantly improved one-minute sit-up performance in both boys and girls, with girls gaining an average of 8.27 sit-ups (a 22.6% jump from baseline) and boys gaining 4.74 (11.9%). Nobody in the training group did a single ab exercise. The rope did that on its own.
The study nobody's citing in ab-workout marketing
Published in the Revista Brasileira de Medicina do Esporte (Brazilian Journal of Sports Medicine) in 2022, the trial split 60 students — 30 boys, 30 girls — into a jump rope training group and a standard physical-education control group. The training group did structured rope work for 12 weeks. The control group did normal PE class. Nothing else changed.
At the end, researchers re-tested both groups on a standard battery: one-minute sit-ups (a proxy for core/abdominal endurance), a 50-meter sprint, and a solid ball throw for upper-body power. The training group didn't just edge out the control group — the gains were large enough to be statistically significant across the board, not a rounding-error difference that happens to favor the intervention.
The core-strength number
Girls in the jump rope group went from an average of 36.6 sit-ups in one minute at baseline to 44.87 after 12 weeks — a gain of 8.27 reps (p=.000, about as far from a fluke as sports-science data gets). Boys improved by 4.74 reps, an 11.9% increase (p=.01). Neither group touched a crunch, a plank, or a sit-up as part of training. The only intervention was rope work.
That's worth sitting with. The fitness industry sells core training as its own category — ab wheels, weighted crunches, "6-minute abs" programs — as if the trunk only gets stronger when you isolate it directly. This study didn't test rope against crunches head-to-head, so it can't tell you rope beats dedicated ab work. What it does show is that an exercise nobody thinks of as a "core exercise" produced a real, measurable core-endurance gain as a side effect of just jumping.
The fitness industry sells you a separate program for every body part. Your core doesn't know the difference between "ab day" and "just staying upright while a rope spins under your feet 140 times a minute."
It wasn't just the midsection
The same 12 weeks produced an 8% improvement in 50-meter sprint time for boys and 4.6% for girls (both statistically significant), plus meaningful upper-body power gains on the solid ball throw — 4.95% for boys, 4.36% for girls. None of that was the target of the training either. Rope work was the only variable, and it moved sprint speed, throwing power, and core endurance at the same time.
Why a rope hits your core without "core work"
There's a mechanical reason for this that doesn't require a new study to explain. Holding an upright, stacked posture while a weighted rope rotates under you and you absorb hundreds of small landings a minute is, functionally, a sustained anti-flexion, anti-rotation isometric hold — your trunk muscles are firing continuously just to keep you from collapsing forward or twisting off-axis with every pass. A plank asks your core to resist gravity while you hold still. Jump rope asks it to do the same job while your whole body is in motion. The demand doesn't go away just because nobody labeled it "ab work."
Where this study doesn't get to go
Being straight about the limits here matters more than the flashy number. This was a study of adolescents (ages consistent with school PE classes), not adults — the trunk and neuromuscular adaptations at that age aren't guaranteed to transfer identically to a 35-year-old's training response. The sit-up test measures muscular endurance, not maximum strength or visible hypertrophy — it doesn't prove rope work will change how your abs look. And because there was no third group doing dedicated ab training to compare against, this study can't tell you rope beats crunches — only that rope alone produced a real core-endurance effect with zero direct ab work in the program.
None of that erases the finding. It just means the honest claim is "jump rope training measurably strengthens your core as a side effect of the movement itself" — not "jump rope replaces every other form of training you'll ever need."
Source: Li M, Wang J. "Long-Term Effects of Jump Rope Training on Athletes' Physical Health." Revista Brasileira de Medicina do Esporte, 2022;28(6):767-770. DOI: 10.1590/1517-8692202228062022_0032.
A study like this one is really a study about structure — 12 straight weeks of the same training, tracked from baseline to finish. That's the part most people skip: not the exercise, the follow-through. Get the Performance Rope for $20 today and unlock the full Training App — a personalized program built around your goal and level, a workout timer that keeps every session honest, and progress tracking that shows you the trend line instead of making you guess — for $9.99/month after. Get the rope and the program that goes with it.