How to do a rope climb pull up

Rope Climb Pull up

The rope climb pull up is a Killer pull up variation in its own right, in fact, it might be even tougher to master than the pull up.

While the Rope Climb might send you down a traumatic memory lane from your high school gym class, don’t let it defeat you.

The rope climb is a great exercise, and if you can conquer it, it will help you improve your pull ups, get stronger and build more muscle.

Rope Climb Pull up: Muscles Involved in the Rope Climb

The rope climb is a vertical pull exercise that strengthens the lats, biceps, and grip muscles in the forearms.

Depending on the position of the legs, the abdominal muscles, quadriceps, and hip flexors will also be involved, to a small extent.

Rope Climb Pull up: Why do Rope Climbs?

The Rope Climb is a Fantastic Exercise that strengthens the lats, biceps, and grip muscles of the forearm.

These are the same muscles involved in the pull up and chin up exercises, so the rope climb has the potential to make your pull ups stronger too.

The rope climb will also improve your kinesthetic awareness because you have to control your body through space.

And because your angle of pull is slightly different in the rope climb as in your pull up, the rope climb can present a novel training stimulus that can help you beat training boredom and break through a pull up plateau.

Done for multiple sets, with short rest breaks, the rope climb can also help you to develop mental toughness and improve your anaerobic conditioning.

Rope climbs are physically exhausting, and training them this way can help you develop the mental grit to withstand just about any physical challenge.

The descent from a rope climb also presents a real eccentric challenge. You really have to descend under control which puts a lot of stress on muscles and tendons to adapt and grow stronger.

If you descend without the use of your legs, the lowering portion of the rope climb is even harder, giving you an even greater training effect.

Rope Climb Pull ups: Efficient Training

The Rope climb can help you to train multiple upper body muscles at once, making your training sessions faster and more efficient.

Performing the exercise in a pike position, with legs to the side of the rope, will also add a bit of training volume for the abs and hip flexors because you have to isometrically contract both of those muscle groups to keep your legs at 90 degrees and straight.

Ever wonder why gymnasts’ abs are so defined? Aside from low body fat levels, gymnasts accumulate a ton of training volume for their abs without even realizing it with pike rope climbs (among a program of other gymnastics-strength movements).

Rope Climb Pull ups: Eccentric Component: 

As I mentioned, Rope Climbs have a huge eccentric (lowering) component, as you are required to slowly lower from the top of a 13-20 foot rope. Well, you could just slide to the bottom, but that is a lot more dangerous and you are likely to rip up your hands!

To descend, you can go hand under hand, adjusting your legs around the rope as you descend.

Or if you are more advanced and keeping your legs out to the side in a pike position, you will simply keep your legs in a static pike hold as you lower hand under hand under control.

This lowering aspect of the rope climb presents a huge eccentric training effect for your lats and bicep muscles.

Rope Climb Pull ups: Eccentric Strength Training

Exaggerated eccentric training can help you build more muscle and strength than a concentric only exercise program.

More muscle is actually built during the eccentric component (lowering) than the concentric component (raising) during any dynamic contraction.

Exaggerated eccentrics–lowering under control with a preset time–can also help you build more maximal strength than concentric training. Hortobaygi et. al found that eccentric training beat concentric training in terms of maximal strength improvements by a mean improvement of 7 percent.

Because you are able to use more weight (about 1.2-1.3 times) for eccentric-only training than concentric training, eccentric training can also help you increase your force output.

Doing heavy eccentrics can also improve your confidence with heavier weights and enable you to make faster strength progress.

Eccentrics also teach you how to lower the weight under control and helps build confidence under supra-maximal loads.

Eccentric training also produces more muscle damage than concentric training. Muscle damage is one of the three proposed mechanisms for muscular growth (the other two are mechanical tension and metabolic stress). More eccentric training > greater muscle damage > greater muscular growth.

Furthermore, eccentric training might recruit more fast twitch fibers than concentric training. Fast twitch Type II fibers are responsive to strength and size and are very important to heavy and explosive training. If eccentric training can recruit more fast twitch fibers, it is probably a great tool for the bodybuilder, strength athlete and power athlete.

The rope climb involves an extended eccentric (lowering) component compared to the traditional pull up. This makes it a great tool for size and strength of the lats and bicep muscles and can help you improve your maximum pull up strength, too! 

Rope Climb Pull up: Injury Rehab and Prevention

Eccentric training is also extremely important from an injury prevention standpoint.

It is commonly used in rehabilitation programs for damaged or degenerative tendons (tendinosis).

In a study of patients with achilles tendonosis, patients performing eccentric training had substantially better pain reduction than patients performing concentric exercise.

In a study of patients with Rotator Cuff Tendinosis, those who performed eccentric exercises had markedly better pain reduction than the control group. Five of the nine patients in the eccentric exercise group withdrew from the waiting list for surgery.

Eccentric type training can expose a degenerative tendon to repeated loading and unloading that may help tendon remodeling and repair.

Eccentric type training also increased Type 1 collagen synthesis in injured tendons more so than concentric training.

But eccentric training is not only valuable as a rehabilitation tool, it is also useful in the the prevention of tendon injuries.

Experts hypothesize that eccentric training exposes the tendons to more load than concentric only training and may increase tendon strength more than concentric training.

Eccentric training also teaches the athlete or trainee to decelerate under load. This is important in dynamic sports where the athlete must decelerate to absorb impact without injury, in sports such as figure skating, football, soccer and gymnastics.

Because the rope climb involves a heavy eccentric component, it might help expose the upper body tendons to more load and help them to get stronger, faster, and become more resilient against injury. 

Rope Climb Pull up: Body Awareness

The rope climb helps develops body awareness, which is an important skill in just about any sport and for injury prevention purposes.

Rope Climb Pull up: Work Capacity

Rope climbing is hard and that is what makes it great! Done for multiple sets, with little rest between sets, will help you develop muscular endurance in your upper body pulling muscles and will wind you like few other exercises!

It can be a great tool to improve your overall work capacity and mental toughness-try not to puke after 5 back-to-back rope climbs!

The rope climb pull up and other compound exercises are excellent for work capacity and can even improve your VO2 max.

Rope Climb Pull up: Execution

First, make sure your rope is properly affixed overhead (you do not want to come crashing down) and you have a soft, absorbent mat underneath you. You may feel like a wimp with the mat, but that is ok. (We always put a soft mat under the rope as gymnasts. Gymnastics teaches you to manage risk when you can. Adding a mat underneath the rope is a prudent way to manage a small but still present risk of falling off the rope).

Start with one hand over the other about eye height. Pull yourself up, and then affix your legs around the rope. Continue this hand over hand motion until you can no longer continue (if that is only half way up, that is OK).

Then slowly lower hand under hand to reverse the motion, adjusting your foot and leg position as needed. As I mentioned, this lowering component will help you build more strength for the pull up.

Once you can do multiple rope climbs easily with your legs, experiment first with the straddle rope climb.

In this variation, straddle your legs to the rope but don’t close your legs around the rope. Your upper body will have to do more of the work.

If you are not strong enough yet to go up the rope this way, climb the rope as normal and then straddle your legs on the way down. I promise the descent will be enough of a challenge.

And when straddle climbs become manageable, congratulations! You are now ready to graduate to pike climbs. Keep your legs to the side of the rope in the pike position. If this is unmanageable at first, climb up in a straddle position and go down in a pike position.

Rope Climb Pull up: Training Program

Day 1: Try the Rope Climb and See which category you fall into:

Beginner: Cannot climb the rope to the top

Intermediate: Can climb the rope all the way up

Advanced: Can perform a straddle or pike rope climb (up and down)

Rope Climb Pull up: Beginner Program:

Month 1

Tuesday: Ascend 1/2 the rope and come down under control x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday: Band Assisted Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 3 x 6-8

Saturday: Ascend 1/2 the rope and come down under control x 3

Month 2

Tuesday: Ascend 3/4 the rope and come down under control x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday: Band Assisted Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 3 x 6-8

Saturday: Ascend 3/4 the rope and come down under control x 3

Month 3

Tuesday: Ascend the rope and come down under control x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday: Band Assisted Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 3 x 6-8

Saturday: Ascend the rope and come down under control x 3

Rope Climb Pull up: Intermediate Program

Month 1

Tuesday: Climb the rope and come down in a straddle x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday:  Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 3 x 6-8

Saturday: Scale 1/2 the rope and come down in a straddle x 3

Month 2

Tuesday: Climb half the rope in a straddle (finish with legs) and come down in a straddle x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday: Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 3 x 8-10

Saturday: Climb half the rope in a straddle (finish with legs) and come down in a straddle x 3

Month 3

Tuesday: Climb the entire rope (up and down) in a straddle  x 3 (rest as needed)

Thursday: Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 4 x 8-10

Saturday: Climb the entire rope (up and down) in a straddle  x 3 (rest as needed)

Rope Climb Pull up: Advanced Program

Month 1

Tuesday: 1/2 up rope in pike, finish “up” in straddle, down in pike position  x 3

Thursday: Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 4 x 8-10

Saturday:  1/2 up rope in pike, finish “up” in straddle, down in pike position  x 3

Month 2

Tuesday: Full pike climb up and down x 2

Thursday: Pull ups with 3 second negative (eccentric) 4 x 8-10

Saturday:  Full Pike climb up and down x 2

Month 3

Tuesday: Full pike climb up and down x 3

Thursday: Weighted Pull ups with 3 second negative 5 x 3 reps

Saturday:  Full Pike climb up and down x 3