CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Treadmills, stair climbers, stationary bikes. If your objectives are speed and endurance, there are no better tools.

But what if your goal is strength? What if you love the ease of performing one motion repeatedly, but care more about your arms than your legs?

Well, then, you need an endless rope machine, a device that lets you pull or simulate climbing as long as your poor triceps will allow. Upper-body masochists, take note: this thing can get you in serious shape.

I'll never forget my first encounter, for it was love at first sight. When I spotted Marpo's Rope Trainer a few weeks ago across the crowded floor of the Recreation Center at Cleveland State University, I could tell immediately I'd found not just a worthy topic for a column but also a fitness friend for life.

I'd already run and lifted that day, so wearing myself out didn't take long. But that short period was one of the most effective I'd ever spent in a gym. I walked away feeling like the Incredible Hulk, with a pleasant and unusually localized sense of exhaustion in my biceps and triceps.

The method was simple, almost elegant. Easy and yet incredibly difficult at once.

I sat on a stool at a piece of equipment resembling a lat pulldown machine. Only instead of a weighted bar, I grabbed and kept pulling a vertical loop of rope around two pulleys. A lever in the middle let me adjust resistance, while a monitor kept track of time, calories and how many feet of rope I'd tugged.

Within minutes, my triceps, always a tricky area to address, were cooked. The weakness that made rope-climbing day in middle-school gym class so agonizing came roaring back as I forced myself to continue for 10 grueling minutes. I got by pretending the act was heroic, imagining I was pulling my family to safety.

And yet I'd only scratched the surface of the machine's potential. To experience the rope trainer (marpokinetics.com) in all its glory, I had to come back another day and experiment with other stances, grips and methods of pulling.

To hit my triceps, I learned, the key element was to hold my elbows tightly at my side. As long as I did that, it really didn't matter whether I sat or stood. Pulling in an upward direction yielded similar results.

The emphasis shifted dramatically, however, when I freed my elbows or stood to one the side of the machine, rather than in front. With just a few minor tweaks, I could direct the work-load to my biceps, shoulders, or back muscles. Later I saw that by holding the rope differently, I could also tax my forearm, arguably the puniest part of my body.

In short, with a little creativity, I realized I could put the rope trainer to just about any use I wished. I even found an aerobic application. By lowering the resistance to "easy" and adopting a slower pace, I was able to yank an entire mile of cord in one sitting.

Talk about a workout. Not since my last CrossFit session or days of doing P90X had I hit my upper body so intensely, and yet here I'd only visited one machine and spent just 30 minutes.

So maybe I've found my magic bullet: A quality strength workout without the time commitment or whole-body exhaustion of a weight routine. If the rope training machine were a ship, I'd be pulling myself aboard.

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