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Rope Tuck

ROPE TUCK

Taken from Dave Draper's book, Brother Iron, Sister Steel

This one’s my favorite. The rope tuck, while specifically an abdominal exercise, can be manipulated by body positioning and concentrated muscle contraction to work countless details of the upper torso. Start with a pulley system that provides a single overhead cable from which you can attach your favorite rope handle. Choose an appropriate weight through trial and error (approximately thirty percent of bodyweight), grab the rope, kneel down about three feet in front of the system and sit back on your heels. Bend forward toward the weight stack with the rope under tension and close to your lowered forehead. You’re ready to practice the movement as you assess the resistance on your abs and throughout the upper body, determine your range of motion and facility to move with muscle-focused efficiency.

The first ten reps are performed with the arms held rigid, rope-grasping fists near the temples, the torso moving up and down by the power of the abs. Important: the entire abdominal muscles are contracted to do the hard work. Don’t lunge forward and accomplish the motion with the assistance of your bodyweight. Nice try.

Moving on, continue the action with a slight shift of the body and grip predominance to the right for five longer-motion reps, and, likewise, shift to the left and repeat. These variations add interest and further the involvement of the torso to include the obliques and intercostals. An extended overhead range of motion affected by the cable enables you to bring in serratus and lats while you are continually loading, stimulating and fatiguing the grip and biceps.

We’ve got the whole family playing, the heart’s beating and the sweat’s pooling. I don’t usually stop there. We’re twenty reps into the set and there’s five or ten or fifteen left. Five more tucks to the front to complete and balance the abdominal obligation and we can pull ourselves off our knees and in one motion bring the legs around and assume a seated position whereupon we allow the cable to completely extend forward; we’re still on our haunches and savoring the relief of extension. The hands are giving way but not until we count five more tugs with the rope to the front of our body, our chest and back arched and contracted. That’s set Number One. I love to superset these with light-weight deadlifts for four sets of ten. Perhaps I can forego the aerobics today.