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How To Get Double Unders!

To finish out our week of double unders, I’m gonna tell you how different Vegvisir Athlete’s found their way to double unders and give you the exact workout or drill they did!

So to start it off, how did I get my double unders?

How Did Coach Kidd Get Dubs?

Well, in the skill department I learned it in a weird place in my CrossFit career. I had actually been able to do muscle-ups, handstand push-ups, clean 1.5x my body weight, and made a national competition before actually getting a set of 10 unbroken double unders. I hadn’t even incorporated them into my training. 

It was actually at that national competition, The Alpha Showdown, where I brought a cheap standard jump rope since I saw that there was a double under WOD programmed. I practices a total of 5 times before the competition with that rope and I ended up having to borrow a fellow competitors RPM rope to have a crowd of people watch me go from 1st to Last place because I couldn’t even string together 2 double unders. 

I continued to practice occasionally after that but didn’t take it seriously until I did a local competition in Denton where I was in first place. The surprise final event had just 50 double unders. I was in the lead by a good ways when I got to the double unders, picked up the rope, and couldn’t even get 5 in a row!

Having lost two competitions due to my lack of double unders and not getting the movement down, no matter how many cues I got through Youtube videos, I decided to do them every day until I got them.

I would sit down and every minute I would do an the biggest consoled unbroken set I could and would do it until I hit 10 Sets of that volume.

I did that for an entire month, with some cues from Coach Kenny at CrossFit Denton when he saw me doing something off, and went from 5 unbroken double unders on a good day to 50 unbroken double unders on command.

Kidd’s Dub Practice:

3x-5x Per week

10 Minute EMOM:

5 unbroken DUs

If unbroken throughout all the sets, increase by 1-5 reps at the next session!

Coach Brian and Giuli:

There are two athletes who decided to improve their double unders in an extreme and fun way…

The RPM 10k New Year Challenge!

This is a challenge that the jump rope maker, RPM, puts out every January. The challenge is to hit 10k double unders in a month. 

What these athletes did was set a goal for the amount of volume they were gonna hit each day (300+ are needed every day) and over the course of the month went from about 20 double unders at a time to having sets of 50 in the bad. 

While the full challenge is meant for athletes who are quite far along in their double under journey, the principle of it is for everyone!

In fact, we have a challenge that we present at goal review sessions where if an athlete wants to get double unders and they don’t have 10 unbroken yet, if they accumulate 1000 dubs in a month (and record the data for 30 days from the stated start day at their check-in), we order a t-shirt for the athlete from our online store!

1000 Dub Challenge

Achieve 1000 double unders in a month by practicing for 10 minutes, 10 times in a month, achieving 100 double unders in each session!

OR 20 days of 50 OR however you choose to break it up!

Laura S. and Rhythm!

So if you have learned anything from these posts, it’s that you just need to do double unders for your best chance at double unders! Sometimes it is just a hand placement thing you need some trial and error to figure out. Sometimes you just aren’t jumping high enough.

But, what if EVERYTHING is going right and just can’t string them together? 

Then you have a Rhythm problem. 

This was the issue Laura was running into during her 1000 dub challenge and she searched the internet and found an old coaching video that I had dismissed because I hadn’t seen it work as a drill in the old gym I taught at. The thing was, that it works, just for athletes that have all the other steps down!

In proving me wrong, Laura went from getting 2 double unders at a time to now getting 20-30+ dubs at a time!

The drill?

Laura’s Rhythm Drill

Before doing double unders practice do this:

4 Sets:

:30 on/ :30 off

Max Effort Clap Drill

(Put the jump rope down. Start jumping high like you would for a double under with your hands at your side. Every time you jump in the air, clap your hands twice against the side of your leg before you land. That is the rhythm at which you spin your jump rope!)

Video: The Penguin Drill

How Will You Get Dubs?

The thing to note from all of the info this week is that there are many ways to get double unders. Everyone finds their way to getting the movement eventually, they just have to want to do it and set aside time to practice it!

If you don’t have extra time, you can always apply it mid MetCon and/or talk with a coach to get the right amount of reps in a workout for you to advance your skills!

Let us know if ya want help with getting this movement if ya haven’t already and we can help you try and find the right drill to get ya to a less frustrating day with your jump rope!

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