New in the App: Speed Ladder Workouts

We spent a good part of this year filming and building speed ladder content, and it’s now live in the Shadow Boxing App. You get guided ladder workouts, a tutorial video for every movement, a beginner program, and a level setting so the drills match what you can actually do. Here’s what shipped and how it fits into the app you already use.

The workouts

There’s a Speed Ladder Workouts section on the home screen with a handful of sessions in it. They’re deliberately short, between 7 and 17 minutes, because ladder work is best used as a warmup or bolted onto a session you were doing anyway rather than as the whole thing.

The two ends of the range tell you what’s there. Basic ladder movements is exactly what it sounds like: get your feet used to the rungs, nothing else going on, no hands involved. Ladder + Combos is the other end, 17 minutes of shadow boxing combinations run through the ladder, where the footwork has to keep working while you’re throwing punches. Everything in between moves you from one to the other.

They run like any other workout in the app. Round timer, audio callouts, on-screen text telling you which drill is next, a video of the movement playing while you do it. You don’t have to remember a drill list or count anything.

It asks how much ladder work you’ve done

During setup, or later in settings, you tell the app your speed ladder level: from “I don’t know how to use the ladder” up through beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The workouts then pull from drills you can handle instead of dropping a Cossack on someone who has never stepped through a rung.

This is the same thing we do for jump rope and boxing level, and it matters more here than people expect. Ladder drills look easy on video and are unforgiving in practice.

Every movement has a tutorial

The technique catalogue now has a Speed Ladder section covering everything the workouts use. It starts with plain movement through the rungs and works up through hops, straddles and the harder athletic drills like the Cossack, then moves into the ones with hands attached, where you step through and land a jab or roll under after a combination.

Each one has a short description and a full tutorial video, filmed in a gym with an actual boxer rather than animated. You can look up a movement before a workout, or pause mid-round if a callout is unfamiliar.

Ladder work anywhere else you want it

Two smaller additions that make this usable day to day:

• The workout list has a “With a speed ladder” filter, so when the ladder is rolled out you can see everything that uses it in one tap.
• The custom workout builder has a ladder section, so you can build your own session mixing ladder drills with bag work, shadow boxing, or strength and cardio exercises.

If you don’t own a ladder, nothing changes. The app doesn’t push ladder workouts at you, in the same way it leaves jump rope alone when you say you don’t have a rope.

Start with Speed Ladder 101 if you’re new

If you’ve never used one, the Speed Ladder 101 program is the place to start. Five days, each introducing a few techniques with video before putting them into a short workout: movements, first drills, adding punches, harder drills, then combos. There’s also a short guide on buying a ladder, which mostly says don’t spend more than $30.

We made all of it with Bere, an amateur boxer who does this stuff properly, the same way we work with real coaches and athletes for everything else in the app. We also put together a quick video tour of the program, and wrote about why the ladder is worth training on at all if you need convincing first.