Make your own speed ladder
Did you miss out on the panic buy of gym equipment thanks to COVID? Don’t worry. Here’s how to make a speed ladder at home to add some variety and fun to your next workout.
Like a lot of us, when COVID was announced as a global pandemic, I was caught off guard. While I was lucky enough to nab online a cheap exercise bike and resistance bands while gyms where shut, it was slim pickings for everything else.
Including, speed ladders. These range from $20 and upwards and are a great fitness aid to improve agility, speed, and footwork. It’s for this reason runners love them. However, they’re beneficial for anyone wanting to improve coordination, balance and strength. And they’re great for cardio and torching some serious calories.
I wanted a set for my mid-stage ACL rehab to help with proprioception (sensing my body’s movement in relation to space) and to get running ready. But when I found out these were sold out at my local Rebel, I decided to make my own at home. And you can too. All you need is a garage floor, painters or masking tape, scissors and a tape measure.
Follow my five steps on how to make a speed ladder at home
- Find a suitable area for your ladder. This could be your garage floor or patio deck – somewhere where you have enough space to create a 4 metre long ‘ladder’ that you can also move freely on either side.
- Assemble your tools. Find a tape measure, scissors and some painters or masking tape in your garage or shed. What works equally well is duct or cloth tape.
- Measure out your space. Extend your tape measure to length of 4 metres and lay it flat on the floor, numbers facing up. Ensure you have the tape centred in the area you want to workout on.
- Measure out your tape. A basic speed ladder is made up of a series of squares 40 cm by 40 cm. Measure out your tape into 40 cm lengths and place them in a vertical line at 40 cm intervals against your tape measure. Keep going to tell you’ve mapped out a length of 4 metres. This should equal 10 boxes.
- Complete your boxes. Now with your ladder lines marked out, run tape along the length of both sides to enclose your rectangle…and you’re done!
Do a quick google search, or scroll through your fav Instagram fitness crush and you’ll see a ton of speed ladder drills.
Here are three of my favourite speed ladder drills
- Ladder runs – stepping your feet one after the other into the square, then outside the square before progressing quickly to the next box moving forward through the ladder.
- High knee side step – a 3 step shuffle starting parallel to the ladder. Place one foot into the box, replace quickly with the opposite foot, stepping down outside the box with the starting foot and driving the opposite leg into a high knee position, holding for balance. Repeat again with speed moving up the ladder.
- Jumping jack feet – you got it, star jumping your way with two feet in each square, two feet out down the entire ladder.
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Until next time,
Maryanne K
