Jump ropes are a hit with boxers, home fitness aficionados, and school kids for a reason. They offer an effective, high-impact aerobic workout without requiring a lot of equipment, a significant financial commitment, or space. If regular jump roping isn’t challenging enough, don’t worry. There’s a surprising variety of weighted jump ropes out there. But with different features—including price points, adjustability, and even the presence or absence of a cord—choosing the right one can feel downright overwhelming. 

We tested some of the most popular weighted jump ropes to find the best ones. After hours of research, chatting with a long-time jump rope expert, and more than a dozen workouts with five different products, our top pick is the Crossrope. 

The Best Weighted Jump Ropes

I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I fell in love with Crossrope’s Get Fit bundle before I even finished unboxing it. Its black, white, and mint green color scheme charmed me, as did the handy black drawstring bags the jump ropes come with. Once I used the jump ropes, I knew my instincts were correct. This product stands out from the competition in every single way, including user-friendliness, fit, versatility, durability, aesthetics, and accompanying technology. 

Crossrope’s main differentiator from the rest is the fact that it lets you change out its weighted ropes. The Get Fit bundle comes with two sets of handles, each of which can be paired with two ropes of different weights. (The “Get Lean” set, which includes the lighter ropes, and the “Get Strong” set, which includes the heavier ropes, are each available for $129 and $169, respectively.) With a simple, satisfying click, the rope is inserted into the handle and locked into place. I had no doubt that it would stay locked until I chose to disengage the handles from the rope.

Crossrope is the only product we tested that puts the weight in the rope instead of the handles, which is a huge plus. Almost immediately, I could feel that this kind of weight offered a far more challenging workout, both in terms of upper body strength and overall agility. I also felt that the sturdy ropes and handles would stand the test of time. 

When you order your rope, you have to choose one of five size options that range from XS to XL, which include a 7-foot rope designed for users 4’6” and shorter, a 9.5-foot rope designed for users who are 6’2” and taller, and several ropes in between. At 5’0”, I was at the very bottom edge of the size range for the small rope. While I felt like I could have benefited from sizing down, I was easily able to slide my grip down toward the base of the handles to make it work. 

I also appreciated the wealth of workout videos that were available on the Crossrope app. Although I didn’t pay for a premium subscription ($11.99 a month or $69 a year), there are plenty of free videos to choose from. You can filter by duration, which rope you’re using, difficulty level, whether you’d like to include resistance training (i.e. weights) and what type of workout you’re looking for (HIIT, strength, or endurance), and more. 

While the bundle I tested didn’t include any technology to count my jumps or collect any other data, you have the option to access those options by upgrading to the Bluetooth-enabled handles and paying for a subscription to the Crossrope app.

One of the only downsides to the Crossrope is its price. Even if you purchased only one of the two products in the bundle, you’d still be paying upwards of $100. Another potential issue is that the heavier ropes can cause serious damage. It wasn’t a huge deal if I accidentally missed a jump or got too close to my furniture with the other products, I actually hurt myself and nearly missed slamming the heavy rope into my coffee table a few times. I’d suggest making sure you have plenty of space (and patience) if you’re planning to use the Crossrope, especially with the Get Strong set. 

If you’re looking for a workout you can do at home (read: no gym membership or studio fees required), have some jump rope experience, and feel confident it’s something you’d enjoy doing long-term, it’s a solid investment. 

The Everlast jump rope is a solid choice for anyone who is looking for a versatile jump rope at a very reasonable price. The rope has a solid feel that immediately made me feel like it was a quality product. Although it isn’t weighted, it’s thick and heavy enough to avoid the tangles and kinks that made some of the other less expensive options hard to use. 

The Everlast is adjustable, but it’s a manual process. There’s a section of the rope that is attached to the base of each handle with a plastic fastener on the end. You have to loosen the fastener, pull a section of rope through, cut it at the appropriate length, and then refasten the plastic fastener. I was careful to cut my rope in small chunks, because once you’ve shortened it, there’s no turning back. While it was convenient to be able to cut the rope to my exact length preference, one downside of the length adjustment process is that you might not be able to share your jump rope with another member of your household if you’re of different heights. 

Similarly, it’s super simple to change out the weights in the handle. The rope comes with three half-pound weights that can be inserted in each handle, giving you the options of .5, 1, or 1.5 lbs in each handle. The handles each have a spring to keep the weights from rattling around in the handles. 

I also liked the feel of the handles themselves. They’re fairly wide and covered in a foam that felt thick enough to offer comfortable cushioning but dense enough that I wasn’t worried about them absorbing my palm sweat and becoming little bacteria and odor storage units. I got the sense that this jump rope would last a long time, even if you use it outdoors.

It doesn’t come with any kind of technology to help you keep track of your jumps or any other data. But for the price, I wouldn’t expect this.

What Are Weighted Jump Ropes?

A weighted jump rope looks just like a regular jump rope. The only difference is that it carries extra weight, which usually ranges from about half a pound to 10 pounds. This slows down the rate at which the rope turns and increases the effort needed to use it, especially in the upper body. 

You can expect to find three kinds of weighted jump ropes:

1. Weighted in the cord: In this type of jump rope, the cord, rather than the handles, is where the extra weight is distributed. The Crossrope was the only rope we tested that landed in this category.  
2. Weighted in the handles: The most common type of weighted jump rope, the extra weight is in the handles. Many products allow you to open up the handle to add or remove extra weight. The Everlast, Bala, and Te-Rich products all fell into this category. 
3. Cordless: A cordless rope is essentially two handles—just like what you’d find on the ends of a normal jump rope—with a short cord sticking out of them. Attached to each cord is a ball. So while you are engaging in the same basic movement pattern as you would while jumping rope, you don’t have to coordinate the timing of your jumps with the rope. The Aplugtek and Te-Rich ropes were in this category. 

What Style of Weighted Jump Rope is Best?

I found that ropes that carry the weight in the cord to be most effective. But you need to be careful with these, says Tim Haft, a Manhattan-based certified personal trainer and founder and president of Punkrope. (And based on personal experience, I can absolutely confirm!) One wrong move could injure a pet or child who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and losing your grip could mean risking property damage. 

Haft suggests avoiding the cordless type, however. The product features a comfortable handle, which attaches to a six-ish-inch rope with a ball that’s slightly bigger than a tennis ball on the end. You hold the handles and rotate your wrists as you jump (like you would a regular jump rope), but instead of having to skip over the rope, you just jump, and you feel the weight of the ball rotating with every jump. 

With jumping rope, “The purpose is to improve coordination and ability. Now, with no cord, there’s zero coordination. The only reason I’d endorse it is if someone finds it fun,” says Haft.

Weighted Jump Rope Benefits

Jumping rope (whether it’s weighted or not) is an excellent way to boost or maintain your cardiovascular fitness and aerobic capacity while building bone density, agility, coordination, and speed, says Haft. 

Research has shown traditional jump roping can have significant benefits across the lifespan. A meta-study Taylor & Francis Online “Jump rope training effects on health- and sport-related physical fitness in young participants: A systematic review with meta-analysis” View Source looking at the effect of jump roping on young people found that the activity was associated with benefits including improvements in resting heart rate, cardiovascular endurance, upper and lower body strength, range of motion, and sprinting. Another study JAMA Network “Benefits of 2 Years of Intense Exercise on Bone Density, Physical Fitness, and Blood Lipids in Early Postmenopausal Osteopenic Women” View Source found that for a group of early postmenopausal osteopenic women, two years’ worth of regular exercise (including jumping) was associated with significant improvements in strength and endurance as well as bone density, back pain, and lipid levels, compared to the control group. 

Unfortunately, the benefits of weighted jump ropes in particular haven’t been researched among adults. However, the data suggests they’re a valuable form of cross-training for young female volleyball players. While it might be a leap to say the average adult will experience the same benefits, one study The Journal of sports medicine and physical fitness “The effects of rope or weighted rope jump training on strength, coordination and proprioception in adolescent female volleyball players” View Source found that girls who used weighted jump ropes experienced improvements in their core and upper body strength as compared to those who trained with traditional jump ropes. 

Are Weighted Jump Ropes Worth It?

With a weighted rope, you can expect to feel the extra weight and muscle engagement in your chest, back, shoulders, and core. The act of jumping will also work your legs. This makes it a great workout on its own. It can also be an effective form of cross-training once or twice a week. Haft has worked with many runners who swapped out some of their runs for jump rope sessions. “Despite decreasing their running mileage, they found that their running times improved,” he says. 

According to Haft, a weighted jump rope’s most significant benefit is that it makes you work a little harder for every jump, which translates into a more time-efficient workout when compared to a regular jump rope. What you lose in endurance, you make up for intensity, which means you can do more in less time—a huge bonus if you’re pressed for time. 

While many traditional jump rope benefits cross over to jumping with a weighted jump rope, there are a few key differences. Haft wouldn’t recommend any type of jump rope for those with heart conditions, and he suggests avoiding a weighted jump rope if you have any wrist issues, including carpal tunnel syndrome, a history of wrist strains, and weak wrists.  He cautions consumers not to watch a few YouTube videos and go out and buy a heavy rope thinking “Wow, this is a great caloric burn,” because the added weight makes it easier to cross the line from intense to injured. Wrists are particularly vulnerable. 

But if you’re looking for an intense, relatively short cardio workout that can help develop your grip strength, forearm strength, and endurance, a weighted jump rope is the way to go, says Haft. He compares the difference between traditional and weighted jump rope to the difference between running on a flat surface versus running uphill. “By picking up that heavy rope, you’re immediately limiting the amount of time you can perform the activity because as the intensity goes up, the endurance goes down,” Haft says.

If you’re going to buy a weighted jump rope, the most important thing to look for is how easy it is to customize the rope’s length. “[Length adjustability] is pretty huge,” says Haft. A good jump rope should be about three feet longer than your height. 

Can Weighted Jump Ropes Replace Weight Training?

If you’re thinking of a weighted jump rope as a substitute for dumbells, barbells, kettlebells, or really any traditional form of resistance training, you may want to think again, says Haft. You shouldn’t expect a weighted jump rope session, where you might be jumping hundreds or even thousands of times, to have the same effects on your muscles as a weightlifting session, where you might engage a muscle group under a much heavier load a few dozen times at the most. This is because each of these scenarios puts a different physiological demand on your muscle fibers—and result in different benefits Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine “Adaptations to Endurance and Strength Training” View Source . While endurance training builds your aerobic capacity, allowing you to work at higher intensities for longer periods of time, strength training increases the size of your muscles and their ability to produce maximal force. 

How We Found The Best Weighted Jump Ropes

Meet Your Guinea Pig

I’m Pam Moore. Before becoming a freelance health and fitness journalist, I earned my Masters’s degree in occupational therapy. For more than a decade I worked in a variety of healthcare settings (mostly hospitals), helping people with chronic and acute medical conditions (think strokes, joint replacements, and head injuries) function as fully as possible. This meant designing treatments that helped my patients grow stronger, more coordinated, and more self-aware, educating patients and their families on how to make their homes as safe as possible. 

In addition to my healthcare experience, I’m also an ACE-certified personal trainer, certified intuitive eating counselor, and fitness geek. As a group fitness instructor for nearly 20 years, I’ve primarily taught indoor cycling along with the occasional barre class.

Our Testing Process

I tested each jump rope for at least three workouts. I built up from five minutes to 15 minutes—a typical timeframe for many jumping newbies—including intervals. 

But before I even began tripping over jump ropes in my basement, I combed the internet, including Amazon, Reddit, and other popular websites’ product roundups to find out which jump ropes were the most popular, how much they cost, what common use cases were, and what people were saying about them. 

I also spent time chatting with a jump rope expert I’d originally interviewed for a jump roping explainer piece I wrote for the Washington Post to learn more about some of the nuances of jump roping, and weighted jump ropes in particular. 

All told, I spent about five hours researching, reporting, and testing products for this story.

The Weighted Jump Rope Buying Guide

Weighted jump ropes are a great choice for time-crunched people who would rather do a short,  high-intensity workout than a longer low to moderate-intensity session. They’re also perfect for anyone who wants to work out at home but doesn’t have a lot of space or a big equipment budget, and those who need a portable workout when traveling. 

While some do the high-octane workout as a boxing warm-up or for its own sake (think: complicated tricks and choreography), others do it for the performance benefits. These include improvements in aerobic capacity, running economy, agility, coordination, power, and speed, and health benefits like improvements in bone density and lipid levels.

Which features matter most when buying this product?

• User-friendliness/comfort: Are the handles easy and comfortable to grip? How well does the rope rotate against the handles? Overall, how does it feel to use this product? 
• Adjustability (weight and length): Can you adjust the weights and if so, how many increments/options are there? If weight is adjustable, how easy is it to make adjustments? For the corded options: is the cord length adjustable? If so, how precisely can you make adjustments and how easy is it to do? 
• Tech: Does it automatically track your jumps? Are other metrics available, such as top speed, average speed, calories burned, or comparisons to past workouts? If tracking technology is available, is it user-friendly? Does it require the use of a companion app? If so, is the app easy to navigate? 
• Durability: Does it seem like it would stand the test of time with repeated use? For the corded options, would the cord wear out quickly if used on concrete, asphalt, or other rough outdoor surfaces?  

Other Weighted Jump Ropes To Consider

There aren’t any clear benefits of using a cordless jump rope to develop your speed, agility, or actual jump rope skills. But it’s a great option if you’re just starting out and you want to see if your body can handle the impact. The cordless jump rope would also be a smart choice if you don’t have the patience or inclination to develop the coordination required to successfully use a traditional jump rope. 

I have to admit, when I unboxed the Aplugtek, my first thought was “Why bother?” But as soon as I started jumping, I thought, “This is actually kind of fun.” It was weirdly motivating to jump without a cord. I was able to get into a rhythm and maintain it without having to experience the pauses and frustrations that come with tripping over the rope. Having the weight in the ball as opposed to the handles or the cord made the cordless option feel more “bouncy” and easier to control. It’s also aesthetically appealing. Mine came in red and black, but there are also options for solid black, pink, and aqua. While I’m a little skeptical about whether the Aplugtek’s foam handles will hold up over time, they felt comfortable enough.

With its selection of retro-chic colors to choose from, a beautiful design featuring curved silicone handles, and a user-friendly app where you can easily find a workout to follow—which includes more than 20 jump rope videos and other types of movements including moving meditations and weight training—Bala’s weighted jump rope has a lot to offer.

Unfortunately, the rope disconnected from one of my handles mid-workout. When I skimmed the reviews on Bala’s website, I found that this wasn’t a freak occurrence. Many other users posted reviews describing the exact same experience. If you love all things Bala—lots of people do—this rope may satisfy you. But for me to recommend a $55 jump rope, it really needs to stay intact for at least the first dozen uses.