Help my Double under please!!!

[Clayton Mowat]

I've been CrossFitting for about a year and a half and I am still stuck struggling with double unders. I have no problem stringing 100 su's together, but as soon as I try du's my left arm drops back behind my hip and I start spinning around and can only do 8-10.

I hurt my left shoulder about a year ago but it seems to be all healed up now. Just wondering if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks in advance.

[Dustin Wintczak]

Do you have a good rope? Ultra Speed, Rouge etc.. That would be the first thing I would do is spend the $12-$20 on a good rope if you're serious about improving. If you've done that the only other solution is to do them every single day until you can string 20, 30, 50 together.

[Clayton Mowat]

Yeah I have both Rogue ropes and 3 different RX ropes. I try to use the same rope (RX buff) so I don't have too many variables. For a while I was doing them everyday and showed little progress. I Stopped doing them as often because I was getting so frustrated.

[Brad Rasmussen]

Originally Posted by Clayton Mowat

I've been CrossFitting for about a year and a half and I am still stuck struggling with double unders. I have no problem stringing 100 su's together, but as soon as I try du's my left arm drops back behind my hip and I start spinning around and can only do 8-10.

I hurt my left shoulder about a year ago but it seems to be all healed up now. Just wondering if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks in advance.

Try to concentrate on wrist speed and keeping your wrists in front of you. Also bounce off the balls of your feet and don't donkey kick. I started nailing double unders after about a year of practice and frustration. I don't have what some would call a good rope, I have a $5 plastic Valeo that I can rip through the du's with now. Try doing three sets of max reps as your warm up prior to your wod, and you'll soon be crankin em out like crazy. Good luck!

[Dennis Mulgrew]

You may want to shorten the rope length and/or hold your arms farther out to the sides. I was able to get double unders after about a year when I started adjusting the rope so that it was cleanly passing in between my feet and the ground (i.e. there was no part of the rope smacking against the ground in front of me each rotation). Start off doing single-unders until you find this sweet spot.

Here are some tips that are hard to convey via text but they might help:

1) Keep loose wrists, but the rest of your arm should be tight;
2) As far as generating power, you want to flick the rope forward as it comes in front of you;
3) People seem to jump in different ways - some just hop slightly on the balls of their feet, some basically do mini tuck jumps, some do a little bit of a leg raise motion on each jump. As far as I can tell, none of this matters. It's all about rope speed generated from the upper body.

And generally speaking, I find that to master certain movements, you need to go into the gym one day with the attitude "I am not leaving until I do this." I had tried to work on DU's for a little before each daily workout, but only became proficient when I went into our Saturday open gym committed to only doing DUs. I jumped probably 2000 times until I was able to string a few consecutive DU's together. Once you can do that, it's like riding a bike - something just clicks and you are able to do it again. I had the same experience with muscle-ups as well.

[Molly Metz]

Originally Posted by Clayton Mowat

I've been CrossFitting for about a year and a half and I am still stuck struggling with double unders. I have no problem stringing 100 su's together, but as soon as I try du's my left arm drops back behind my hip and I start spinning around and can only do 8-10.

I hurt my left shoulder about a year ago but it seems to be all healed up now. Just wondering if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks in advance.

It sounds like a few things to me.

1. remember your gaze, don't look up, that forces the hands back behind our hips. Tip: keep your peripheral on your hands, if you loose site of them, stop, and start over. Keep your gaze forward towards the horizon.
2. Energy comes from the wrist speed, not your upper body, in fact keep your shoulders relaxed and focus on "flicking" your wrists. I do a 10 minute challenge of double unders every year "for fun" at my tournaments and have gone consecutive each year (roughly 1400+ doubles unbroken). I use a pvc trainer rope because of the flexibility of the pvc.. it moves with the jumper, plus I can feel the weight. I use it for all my wods too.... I use the speed rope (wire) for competition day only.

Feel free to email me to, I am a competitive jump rope coach and conduct seminars on double unders around the world... ( :

[Joey Shishineh]

how much do you practice them on a regular basis? Mikko Salo practiced for 2 months straight at 30 mins per day to get them down.

There are a lot of good coaching pointers (most of which were mentioned above) - start with a licorice rope and don't use a wire/ball bearing rope until you have a very good rhythm (BECAUSE the faster the rope, the more precise you have to be in your timing), focus on fast wrists, jump on the balls of your feet, keep your hands in, etc.

Good tips and coaching will definitely help you, but nothing beats practice and the muscle memory and timing gained from practicing every day.

[Molly Metz]

Originally Posted by Clayton Mowat

I've been CrossFitting for about a year and a half and I am still stuck struggling with double unders. I have no problem stringing 100 su's together, but as soon as I try du's my left arm drops back behind my hip and I start spinning around and can only do 8-10.

I hurt my left shoulder about a year ago but it seems to be all healed up now. Just wondering if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks in advance.

Clayton, I am responding to your email today - sorry for the delay. M

[James Yates]

Originally Posted by Clayton Mowat

I've been CrossFitting for about a year and a half and I am still stuck struggling with double unders. I have no problem stringing 100 su's together, but as soon as I try du's my left arm drops back behind my hip and I start spinning around and can only do 8-10.

I hurt my left shoulder about a year ago but it seems to be all healed up now. Just wondering if anyone could give me some advice. Thanks in advance.

I finally got some nice success this week, so I thought I'd share...

I could also do singles to well over 100. I could also alternate single-double for a good stretch. My problem was always linking up the doubles.... from the first one, I would feel them getting away from me with each rep getting more and more frantic until the 4th or 5th at best was always a miss.

So I decided I would work on them hard for my warm-ups and I went back to a technique I heard about before where I would do slow singles, but jump high with a quick bounce-trying to jump as high as possible while having my feet on the ground as little as possible. Once I had that "high bounce" sustained for a bit, I put the rope down and practiced the exact same jumps while saying "1-2-3-1-2-3....", then the same jumps while twirling my wrists.

After all this I grabbed the rope and busted out a few sets in the 7-10 range. Two days later I went through this all again and was in the 10-20 range.... so many that I was not prepared to fail due to exertion rather than timing. OK, so it wasn't really failure due to exertion, but I suddenly realized that DUs will whip you exponentially faster than singles. After catching my breath and focusing again, I got a set near 30 and a best so far of 36!

The key for me was going back and finding the right "bounce"-THEN matching the rope speed to the bounce. Until I really get the hang of it, I will always need a warm-up set of slow, high, bouncy singles. But I finally feel as if progress is happening as opposed to a year and a half of alternating SU/DU and trying to get them strung together by working from that.

HTH

[Clayton Mowat]

Thanks for all the tips everyone!!! I appreciate it