YouTuber Cole Baker knew that the only way to lose body fat was to be in a caloric deficit. Since he didn’t want to change his diet, it would be up to exercise to get him there. After Googling the best exercises to burn calories rapidly, he settled on jumping rope. The simple fitness tool has proved to be an effective cardio workout, after all.
“I decided to jump rope every day in order to help me lose some body fat and transform my body,” he wrote in the video’s description.
At the start of the challenge, he weighed 73kg with 15.1 percent body fat, and 44.1 percent muscle mass. His goal: drop to 13 percent body fat by doing 2,000 skips a day and sticking with his normal weight lifting.
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After just one day, he was already feeling it.
“My calves are so tight and so sore. I’m gonna have to roll them out in recovery,” Baker said.
By the end of week 1, he only dropped .4 percent body fat.
“I knew I had to make some changes, so I decided to remove all snacking from my diet, which is much harder than it sounds during this quarantine,” he said.
After that, Baker noted his body also finally adjusted to the jumping, and it was pretty much a “straight shot from there”.
By Day 19, he was down to 14 percent body fat. And by the end of his challenge, his final stats were: 69kg, 13.5 percent body fat, and 45 percent muscle mass. He lost 8 pounds, and although he didn’t hit his goal body fat of 13 percent, he planned to stick with the routine until he did. But aesthetically, you can see the changes.
“Obviously my abdomen looks much more defined, same with my back. I think those are the two major differences you can see from the before to after,” he said.
He also noticed improvements in his strength training.
“Before I started this challenge I could only max around 106kg, and around 21 days in I was repping 2 for 106kg, and my max increased to 111kg,” Baker said.
To be clear, those gains were more than likely unrelated to his skipping—but good on him for the gains.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health US.
