I’ve spoken before about some of my favourite RIPT exercises. This morning, I added a new one to my list. Now you need to know that I was basically a walking zombie for the first half-hour of today’s class. I’m a bit knackered (some lingering aftershocks from Week 04, I guess), and it took me a while to get out of Neutral this morning.
Fortunately, Neil – who was one of the coaches who did my pre-#MHStaffChallenge assessment; and who is one of my favourite RIPT coaches – had something special planned for the final section of the class. We’d done the heavy lifting, and we’d done the METCON (huge fun, as always)… and all that was left was the final burn.
So out came the Battle Ropes.
Battle Ropes are pretty potent. They’re high-intensity and low-impact. They build muscle and burn kilojoules. And they make a heck of a noise, while making you feel like you’re winning a mighty, Ben-Hur-like chariot race.
Neil had the class partner up into pairs, and while one partner did Battle Rope Waves, the other partner would hold the ropes at the other end. For added, RIPT-level difficulty, we had to do squat lunges, alternating our legs for each flick.
In the Men’s Health Beginners Guide to Battle Ropes, our experts suggest doing Battle Rope Waves (while alternating arms) for “1 to 20 minutes”. In our RIPT class, we did reps of 10 (5 per leg), 8, 6, 4 and 2. You could do it solo, using two ends of the same rope, but doing it in pairs added a handy extra element: active rest.
Yup, there’s something uniquely “active” about trying to hold onto two Battle Ropes while some dude whips the living daylights out of them at the other end.
Try it next time you’re in the gym.
* Main image borrowed under Creative Commons from Flickr user (“usr”?) David Wagner. Thanks, David! I would have used my own cellphone camera (as I usually do), but I got some snarky comments the other day about “blurry and out of focus pictures of the RIPT gym” from this guy, who is a nice bloke but who obviously doesn’t realise that, at 6:30am, “blurry” and “out of focus” is pretty much how I experience the world around me.
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SOURCE: Men’s Health Blog – Read entire story here.
