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The Benefits Of Skipping Rope, And Why You Should Be Doing It

18th March 2021

Fitness Health

18th March 2021

By Shivraj Bassi

Be honest - have you used a skipping rope since you were a kid trying to beat your friend to get to 100 skips on the playground? If not, you’re missing out. Using a skipping rope is one of the most underrated forms of exercise out there, and it may even be more effective than other types of cardio. 

If you add jumping rope into your workout routine, you can look forward to not only burning lots and lots of calories but reducing your risk of heart disease and injury and strengthening your bone density and coordination. 

A study published in 2013 in the Research Quarterly: American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation found that university-aged men who used a skipping rope for 10 minutes a day for six weeks improved their cardiovascular fitness by the same amount as university-aged men who jogged for 30 minutes a day for the same period of time. 

Find out what the benefits of skipping rope are, how to add it to your workout and how long you should jump for to get the most out of it. You’ll need to bring your own rhymes to chant while you jump, however!

Skipping rope burns calories

Incredibly, jumping rope has been found to burn more calories than any other type of cardio. That’s right - more than running, cycling, swimming and rowing. You can burn 200-300 calories in as little as 15 minutes. 

This is because skipping rope is considered to be a form of exercise which is thermogenic, which means it creates a lot of heat in the body, your body then needs to burn far more fuel than usual to produce this large amount of energy. This means that it burns a lot of calories fast. In addition, it works all of the body’s major energy systems - something you can feel when after just a few minutes of skipping rope, when you can feel your muscles beginning to burn and your heart rate skyrocket. 

Skipping rope reduces injury risk and improves your coordination

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Skipping frequently with a rope increases your coordination significantly - to the point where you might notice yourself improving at kicking a ball or your hand-eye coordination. This is due to the fact that the action of jumping rope forces you to carefully coordinate your upper and your lower body to be more agile and nimble at making sure that the rope doesn’t get caught in your feet. Your mental awareness of your body and its movement increases by a lot, and this makes you less injury-prone when doing other activities, such as running, lifting weight and playing sports. 

There are studies to back this up. A study from 2017 in the Research Journal of Pharmacy and Technology discovered that when autistic children, who often struggle with coordination and keeping their balance, skipped rope, it improved their motor coordination. Plus, a 2015 study published by the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine determined that soccer players who were pre-teens and skipped rope had superior motor skills after eight weeks than pre-teens who only did soccer drills. 

Skipping rope strengthens your bone density 

Bone density means the strength of your bones, and how many minerals such as calcium you have within your body making them stronger. Jumping rope strengthens your bone density. Having a higher bone density can reduce the risk that you’ll develop osteoporosis later in life, especially for women and girls. 

This occurs thanks to impact training, such as the constant jumping up and down that you do when you’re skipping with rope. When this happens to your body regularly, the body responds to this form of stress by reformulating the bone in your body to become denser and stronger. In 2019 the Korean Society for Bone and Mineral Research recommended jumping rope for 10 minutes a day to improve your bone strength, so the concept has medical backing. Always speak to your doctor about starting a new activity such as this if you’re unsure if it would be beneficial to you, however. 

Skipping rope improves your heart health

You’ve probably noticed that when you start skipping, your heart starts pumping pretty fast. This means that this form of exercise is great for your cardiovascular system. Jumping rope can even improve the measure of the maximum amount of oxygen a person can use during exercise. The higher this amount is, the higher their amount of cardiovascular endurance. 

In 2019, a study published in the Research Journal of Pharmacy and Technology said that college-aged men who engaged in two sessions of jumping rope a day for three months improved the amount of oxygen their bodies could use during exercise compared to those who just did their usual fitness regimes. 

How should I incorporate skipping rope into my workout regime?

Skipping is cheap and easy - it can be done anywhere, and all you need is an inexpensive jump rope. 

One easy way to include skipping into your exercise routine is to warm up with 10 minutes of jumping rope. You could also use skipping as an activity between rounds of resistance training or other circuits. Think how you did when you were a child, and skip down the street. 

Don't forget to fuel up before you start jumping with one of our proteins or boosters - try The Strong Protein, to give you the power you need to get to the finish line. 

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The Best Supplements for Muscle Recovery

The Best Supplements for Muscle Recovery

Nobody has ever asked me which supplements are best for muscle recovery. Instead, they ask how to build muscle. They ask how to tone up without getting bulky. Recovery is a big part of the answer to both, but one that nobody goes looking for. Which is a shame, because it's where an enormous amount of good training goes to waste. It's also where a lot of money gets wasted. Your local supplement shop or preferred online retailer is almost certainly full of products that either duplicate something you're already taking or do a completely different job to the one implied on the label. Neither makes them bad products, but it does make them a poor use of your budget. The short version is like the rest of the fitness industry – there’s a ton of misinformation out there and it’s easy to get lost in the noise. So this is the list I'd give you if you asked. Nine supplements that are well worth considering, three that are probably worth giving a miss, and how to put them together without paying twice for the same thing. Key takeaways Protein, creatine and tart cherry have the strongest evidence behind them. If you only ever buy three things, buy these. Magnesium, zinc and vitamin D don't speed recovery up so much as lessen the things that hold it back. Vitamin D is crucial, especially through a British winter where there’s not as much sun. Omega-3 and curcumin help manage the inflammatory response. These are useful during heavy training blocks, but not something you want to suppress all year round. Carbohydrate and electrolytes only become a priority when your recovery turnaround is short: think two sessions a day, endurance work, or training in heat. BCAAs aren't a recovery supplement. EAAs work but they usually duplicate your protein powder if it’s high quality. Glutamine's evidence in trained, well-fed people is weak. Tart cherry appears to help you produce force again sooner rather than make you feel less sore, which is the more useful of the two anyway. No supplement compensates for poor sleep, insufficient protein or badly managed training load. What recovery actually involves Before we get to the list, we should take a moment to understand what we're asking these supplements to do. It’ll also start to explain why some of them work and why others never really had a chance. After a hard session, you need three things to happen. Your muscles need repairing, which requires a steady supply of amino acids (the building blocks of new muscle tissue). The inflammation that follows training needs to run its course and resolve; it isn't the enemy here, it's part of how you adapt, but it does need managing rather than leaving to run wild. And your body needs to refuel and reset: your muscle glycogen needs replenishing, hydration restored, and your hormones and nervous system brought back to baseline, most of which happens whilst you're asleep. Which means a supplement can really only do one of three jobs. Supply raw materials. Moderate the inflammatory response. Or support the systems doing the actual repair work. If it doesn't fit into one of those three categories, it's an expensive maybe at best. Keep that in mind as we go, because it's the quickest way to work out whether something belongs in your stack. We've covered the science of post-workout recovery and what's actually happening when you get DOMS in more detail elsewhere. This piece is about what to take to aid things. The non-negotiables These three have the strongest evidence behind them and the biggest practical effect. If you only ever buy three things, make it these. Protein powder (the type matters less than you think) Protein is the raw material. It’s the headliner of recovery and anything muscle related as a whole. Everything else here is a supporting act. You can't build a house without bricks, and you can't rebuild muscle without amino acids. The research points fairly consistently to 1.6g to 2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day if you're training seriously, spread across the day in servings of roughly 0.3g per kilogram. For most people that's 25g to 40g at a time. Powder isn't magic. It's simply the most convenient and cost-effective way to close the gap between what you eat and what you need. Where it gets interesting is which type, because that's where you hear a lot of marketing noise. Firstly, should you choose whey concentrate or isolate? Isolate is filtered further, so it comes in around 90% protein by weight against roughly 70-80% for concentrate, with less lactose and less fat. But here's the part the labels tend to skip: when your total daily protein is matched, isolate has no meaningful advantage for muscle growth or recovery. Choose it if lactose bothers you, or if you're on a tight calorie budget and want the nutrient density. Don't pay extra expecting more muscle. It pays (literally) to know what you’re getting. Casein digests more slowly and gives a sustained release of amino acids over several hours, which makes it quite useful before bed or across a long gap between meals. The better protein blends usually include at least some casein for exactly that reason. Egg protein is excellent, and one of the best options if you're avoiding dairy. But it's worth clearing up a myth that refuses to die: egg is not the most bioavailable protein you can buy. On DIAAS, the current gold standard for measuring protein quality, whey and milk protein score at or above whole egg. Egg is very good. It just isn't the winner it's usually sold as. You deserve a straight answer about beef protein too. It’s often marketed as a cleaner, lower calorie alternative to whey, but a significant proportion of beef protein products are made from hydrolysed collagen or gelatin rather than muscle meat, and collagen has a poor amino acid profile for our purposes. Very little leucine, and no tryptophan at all. It simply can't drive muscle protein synthesis the way whey does. The same applies to collagen powders generally: collagen is a protein, but it isn't a muscle-building one. For most people, a blend covering both fast and slow digesting sources is the most sensible choice. The Strong Protein gives you 34g per serving from whey concentrate, whey isolate and casein together, so you get the immediate spike and the sustained release without managing two tubs. Creatine monohydrate Creatine is the most researched supplement in sports nutrition, and it still gets filed under "strength and size" rather than recovery. That's a mistake. People view creatine purely for its ability to enhance performance, and it definitely does, but it also has value for recovery. That value lies in how quickly you can produce force again. By topping up the phosphocreatine system that fuels high-intensity effort, creatine helps restore performance between hard sessions, and it plays a role in glycogen resynthesis alongside carbohydrates. I do need to provide one honest caveat though. The evidence on whether creatine actually reduces markers of muscle damage is genuinely mixed. One systematic review is titled, without a hint of irony, The Paradoxical Effect of Creatine Monohydrate on Muscle Damage Markers. So I won't tell you it lowers your creatine kinase. What it reliably does is get you back to training hard sooner, which, being honest, is the outcome that really matters to many of the people taking it. Take 3-5g daily, every day, rest days included. Timing is irrelevant. Consistency isn't. You don't need to load, and you want plain monohydrate; the more expensive forms have never convincingly beaten it. If you want a proven, science-backed source of quality creatine, you can find that right here on the Innermost site. The Power Booster is 5g of German-sourced creatine monohydrate and nothing else. There's also 3g built into The Strong Protein if you'd rather not manage another tub. Tart cherry (montmorency) Most articles on the subject of tart cherry get it slightly wrong, so let’s be precise and clear things up. You'll usually see tart cherry described as a soreness remedy. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 trials found something more interesting. There were significant improvements in the recovery of maximal voluntary contraction (your ability to produce force), and the effect grew over the days following exercise. There were also reductions in C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. What there wasn't was a significant pooled effect on muscle soreness itself. So tart cherry appears to help you perform again sooner rather than help you feel less sore. If you're training or competing to a schedule, that's comfortably the more useful of the two. The authors of the review do flag low to moderate certainty and a lot of variation between studies, so treat it as promising evidence rather than set in stone fact. There's one other thing worth adding. Inflammation is part of the signal that drives adaptation, so suppressing it aggressively all year round may cost you some of the progress you're training for. Use tart cherry when recovering quickly genuinely matters more than adapting maximally. That might be during competition weeks, a congested fixture list, or perhaps a hard training camp. Then take it back out. The Strong Protein includes 300mg of Montmorency cherry alongside 250mg of bilberry, both for their anthocyanin content. The supporting cast These four won't transform your recovery on their own. What they do instead is help to lessen the things that might be holding it back, which for a lot of people is where the real gains are hiding. Magnesium Magnesium is involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions, including muscle contraction and relaxation, energy production and protein synthesis. It's also one of the more reliable influencers of sleep quality, which makes it a recovery supplement twice over. It's worth paying attention to because UK intakes are frequently below the recommended daily amount, particularly among younger adults, and hard training increases what you lose through sweat. Form matters more than dose here. Magnesium glycinate or citrate are far better absorbed than the cheap magnesium oxide you'll find in most supermarket products. Aim for 200-400mg daily. There's 200mg in The Strong Protein, and magnesium appears again as part of the ZMA in The Recover Capsules. Zinc Zinc supports immune function, protein synthesis and hormone production, and like magnesium you lose it through sweat, so heavy training weeks are sure to increase the amount you need. We need to be precise about the hormonal claim here, because this is one of the most oversold supplements going. Zinc supports normal testosterone production if you're deficient. It will not push your levels above normal if you're already topped up, and no amount of fancy packaging will ever change that. Correcting a genuine shortfall is worth doing. Chasing a hormonal edge you don't have isn't. Don't megadose either, because sustained high zinc intakes interfere with copper absorption. Around 10-15mg a day is plenty for most people. The Recover Capsules include zinc as part of their ZMA content if you’re looking for a supplement to cover multiple bases in one. Vitamin D If you train in the UK, Vitamin D is one of the things that’s likely to be limiting you without you even realising it. Between roughly October and March, the sun doesn't climb high enough at our latitude for your skin to make meaningful amounts of vitamin D, no matter how much time you spend outside. The NHS advice is that everyone should consider a daily supplement through autumn and winter for exactly that reason. For recovery specifically, vitamin D is involved in muscle function and force production, and low levels have been linked to reduced strength and higher injury risk in athletes. It's also the least exciting item on this list, which is probably why it gets skipped over. Our Recover Capsules provide 1000IU per serving, which is 500% NRV. Whether you choose them or not, make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin D! I truly can’t stress that enough. Omega-3 (EPA and DHA) Omega-3 fatty acids help resolve your body’s inflammatory response rather than simply blunting it, and there's reasonable evidence for reduced soreness and better retention of muscle function after damaging exercise. Look for around 2g of combined EPA and DHA daily, and read the label properly. Plenty of fish oil products advertise an impressive capsule size whilst delivering a fraction of that in actual EPA and DHA. Third-party testing for purity is worth paying for if you’re unsure, and algal oil is an equivalent option if you don't eat fish. Worth it in specific situations These two aren't for everyone. In the right context, though, they're excellent. Curcumin Curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, has built up a reasonable body of meta-analytic evidence for reduced muscle soreness, lower creatine kinase and better retention of functional strength after damaging exercise. It's doing the same job as tart cherry: managing the inflammatory response rather than supplying raw materials. Bioavailability is the main thing to consider here. Curcumin on its own is poorly absorbed, so adding more turmeric to your cooking won't achieve anything useful. Look for a formulation enhanced with piperine (a natural compound found in black pepper), or a phytosome or liposomal preparation. Apply the same caveat as tart cherry. This is a tool for congested periods, not a year-round default. Carbohydrate and electrolytes Refuelling is the third job, and it's the one most lifters can happily ignore. If you train once a day and eat properly, your normal meals will restore glycogen comfortably before your next session. It becomes a real priority when the turnaround is short. If you’re doing two sessions in a day, lots of endurance work, compete in tournament formats, or are training in heat, you might need some additional support. In those cases the research points to roughly 1.0-1.2g of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight per hour in the first few hours after finishing, which is difficult to hit through solid food alone. Hydration belongs here too. Sweat costs you fluid and sodium, and turning up to your next session dehydrated will take more from you than most supplements can give back. The Hydrate Blend covers the electrolyte side with sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. It’s well worth considering if you’re in the market for a top tier electrolyte blend. What about BCAAs, EAAs and glutamine? This is where a lot of people spend too much money, so let's be direct. BCAAs Branched-chain amino acids aren't a recovery supplement, and the reason is simple. They're three of the nine essential amino acids, and you can't build a complete muscle protein from an incomplete set. If your daily protein is adequate, adding BCAAs on top adds nothing to the repair process. That's a separate question from whether they do anything at all. Taken before or during training they have a role in perceived exertion and central fatigue, helping the session feel more manageable rather than helping you recover from it afterwards. That's a legitimate job, and it's why you'll find 5g of BCAAs in The Workout Blend, sitting alongside citrulline, beta-alanine and caffeine in a pre-workout formula. Just don't buy them expecting a recovery benefit they were never designed to deliver. EAAs Essential amino acids do work. All nine are present, so unlike BCAAs they can genuinely fuel muscle protein synthesis. The problem is redundancy. If you're already hitting 1.6-2.2g/kg of protein a day from food and a protein powder, you're paying a second time for something you've already bought. There are real cases where they earn their place. Poor appetite. Avoiding dairy without a good alternative. Training fasted first thing in the morning. Older trainees dealing with anabolic resistance, where the leucine threshold is genuinely harder to reach. Outside of those, sort your total protein out first and pay close attention to your diet overall. L-Glutamine Glutamine has a strong reputation and a weak evidence base, at least for the people usually buying it. In trained, well-fed individuals it has repeatedly failed to produce meaningful improvements in soreness, strength recovery or body composition. The gut and immune benefits people cite are real enough, but they come largely from research in extreme endurance loads and clinical settings. Those are states of physiological stress that lifting three to five times a week simply doesn't replicate. If you're training hard and eating enough protein, you're almost certainly getting plenty of glutamine already. You’d be better off spending that money on protein or creatine. How to build your recovery stack Rather than buying everything at once, build it in layers. The Foundation: protein, creatine, vitamin D. This is the version almost nobody regrets. Raw materials, force restoration, and the deficiency most likely to be holding you back. If budget is tight, stop here. You're already in a really strong position and are capturing the majority of the benefits available from supplements when it comes to muscle recovery specifically. Complete: add magnesium, zinc and omega-3. Worth it once you're training four or more times a week and the basics are consistent. These address what accumulates with volume, and the sleep quality everything else depends on. Hard block: add tart cherry, curcumin, carbohydrate and electrolytes. Reserve these for periods where recovering fast genuinely matters more than adapting maximally. Then take them back out, save your money and rely on your diet, which should always be the foundation of everything you put into your body anyway. Notice that the list gets shorter as your budget gets tighter, not longer. That's deliberate. The most important recovery tool isn't a supplement It would be strange to write all of this without saying the obvious thing. Sleep is the single biggest recovery variable you have, and no combination of capsules compensates for consistently getting six hours or more of sleep a night. Your total daily protein matters far more than which powder you choose. And managing your training load, programming deloads before you need them rather than after, will do more for how you feel and perform than anything on this list. Supplements are worth taking. They're worth taking because they close specific, identifiable gaps, not because they replace the fundamentals. They're the final few percent, and the foundations have to be there first. If sleep is where you're struggling, The Reset Capsules combine reishi, L-glycine, lemon balm and chamomile for exactly that. But the habits come first.
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Your Summer Survival Kit (From Someone Who Travels A Lot)

Your Summer Survival Kit (From Someone Who Travels A Lot)

I'm putting the finishing touches to this post from an airport, which feels appropriate. By my count, I'll be going through three countries in the next six weeks. Meetings, a trip to see family including my niece and nephew, a supplier visit in Italy that I've been putting off for a year. And every summer the same thing happens. The carefully built routine, the one that took months to lock in, gets thrown into a suitcase and I hope for the best. Most people react to this by either giving up on the routine entirely ("I'll sort it out when I'm back") or overpacking so aggressively that half of it never leaves the bag. I've done both. Neither works. What actually works is deciding, in advance, which two or three things earn a place in my bag and which ones can wait until September. So here's mine. Not a wellness influencer's "what's in my bag" video. An honest list, built over about a decade of getting this wrong first. Why travel breaks routines specifically It's worth being precise about what actually changes when you travel, because it isn't just "less discipline." Three things shift at once. You sweat more and drink less water than usual, because you're distracted or the flight dried you out or the hotel room is warmer than home. You're outdoors more, often somewhere sunnier than wherever you live. And your meals stop being yours. You eat what's available, when it's available, and protein is usually the first thing to slip, because sugar, carbs and fat are what's on offer at 6am airport cafes. None of this is a discipline problem. It's an environment problem. The fix is making sure two or three specific things are in my bag before I leave home, so I’m not relying on willpower to begin with. 1. Electrolytes, non-negotiable Most people remember to pack sunscreen. Almost nobody packs electrolytes, and it's the one that actually catches up with you. Water replaces volume, not what you lose through sweat, which is mostly sodium and potassium and magnesium doing the quiet work of keeping muscles firing and fluid balanced properly. Miss that balance for a few days in the heat and you get the symptoms everyone blames on jet lag: the headache, the flat energy, the slight fog by 4pm that a coffee doesn't fix. It's usually not jet lag. It's electrolytes. I take The Hydrate Blend  for exactly this reason. Six electrolytes, no sugar, no synthetic flavouring, dissolves in a bottle of water in about ten seconds. One sachet on a travel day, first thing in the morning, does more for how I feel by evening than anything else in the bag. 2. Something for the sun you're actually going to get Here's the part most people don't think about until it's too late. UV exposure accelerates collagen breakdown, which is a slightly clinical way of saying that a week of proper sun does more to skin structure than most of the year combined. This isn't about vanity. It's a straightforward mechanism: UV generates free radicals that degrade existing collagen faster than your body can replace it. Sunscreen protects against the burn. It doesn't do anything for the collagen you're losing underneath. I've been taking The Glow Blend through summer for this reason specifically. Hydrolysed collagen peptides paired with vitamin C, which matters because vitamin C is a required co-factor for collagen synthesis and most collagen products leave it out entirely, then wonder why customers don't notice anything. It won't undo a week in the sun. It gives your skin something to rebuild with while it's under more pressure than usual. 3. Protein, especially when the meals aren't yours This is the one I've learned the hard way. When your diet goes inconsistent, protein is usually the first macronutrient to drop, simply because it's the hardest to find on the move. Airport food, hotel breakfasts, whatever's left at a conference buffet by 1pm, none of it is built around protein. And the honest science here is less dramatic than people expect: you don't need to train harder to maintain muscle through a disrupted period, you need to keep protein intake somewhere close to normal. That's the whole trick. I'll say this honestly because I'd rather be straight with you than pretend otherwise: my go-to for this is still The Strong Protein (whey based) and The Health Protein (vegan). They earn their place in my bag because they travel well, mix with nothing but water, and does the one job that actually matters on the road, which is making sure protein doesn't disappear from your day just because your routine has. The actual point None of this is about maintaining perfect discipline on holiday. Nobody does that, and if a brand tells you they do, they're not being honest with you. It's about deciding in advance which three or four things matter enough to bring, so the choice isn't being made for you by whatever's in the hotel minibar. If you've got a system that works for you when you travel, reply and tell me. I read every one of these, and I'm always looking to steal a better idea for my next trip. If this is useful, forward it to whoever in your life is about to live out of a suitcase for the next few weeks. It's the email I wish someone had sent me a decade ago.
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