Jumping rope is not just an effective cardio workout, it’s also one of the most efficient and most portable, requiring nothing more than a rope and a small space to properly carry out. It’s also perfect enough that the exercise has hardly changed in the many years that people have been doing it. Until now, that is, with the Smart Rope.
Like normal jump ropes, you can swing the rope over and over, skipping over it every time it touches the ground. Unlike them, it comes fitted with embedded LEDs that flash a real-time display of your rope-jumping stats while you’re exercising, allowing you to keep a constant watch on how the workout is going without having to keep count (which is never accurate anyway) or pause to look down on a separate device (like a fitness tracker or a smartphone).
Made by Tangram, the Smart Rope is fitted with sensors on the handles, recording your movements to keep track of every skip you make. Since the sensors are fine-tuned to monitor the natural motion of skipping rope, it’s able to more accurately track specific movements that accompany the exercise compared to fitness trackers, making it a better option for jump rope exercises.
It uses a 23-LED array to display the count in mid-air, allowing it to show up to four digits at a time. There’s also a toggle option (available on the handle) that lets you switch the information between skip counts and calories burned. The accompanying app, of course, records all your workout stats, as well as designs interval training workouts based on your exercise data and body mass index.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for Smart Rope. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at $60. Now, if they can only add kinetic charging so the jump rope charges itself during exercise, it will be perfect.