BURPEES: The Ultimate Bodyweight Workout We Love To Hate!
We all have a love-hate relationship with the burpee. We love it because it is the ultimate bodyweight workout, but we hate it because, well…it’s hard!
Burpees combine both cardio and strength training. When done properly and consistently, the exercise provides a high-intensity workout that is sure to not only condition your muscles (including your shoulders, arms, core, glutes, quads, hamstrings, and even extremities like your hands), but also get your heart pumping, your lungs working, and the sweat flowing. In a nutshell, burpees are an excellent exercise to help you get in shape fast.
Not only will burpees increase your cardio health and muscle strength, they will also increase your functional fitness, thus helping you perform better in your everyday life. Walking, lifting things, going up stairs, etc., become a lot easier.
The exercise is also a clever way to gauge your fitness. If you start feeling sore after just a few burpees, your challenge will be strength-based; if you catch yourself running out of breath, your challenge will be cardiovascular and stamina-based. The nice thing about burpees is that the exercise helps you develop on both fronts.
However, I'm pretty sure no one in the history of mankind has ever said, "Damn, I wish there were more burpees." Because, probably, they are hard! But like all things, they get easier with practice. Start by setting a timer for three minutes and see how many burpees you can complete in that amount of time. Even if you complete just a few burpees every day, you will start to notice improvement over time — you will be able to do more reps in that three-minute timeframe over the course of weeks or months. And one day, you may even look forward to doing “Birthday Burpees!”
To perform a basic burpee:
Stand straight with your arms at your side
Squat until your hands reach the floor
Using your hands as anchors, jump and thrust your legs backward. When you land, you should be in plank position
Do a pushup
Return your feet to the squat position
Jump up as high as possible
There is nothing exceedingly difficult about the individual components of this movement. Squat, kick your feet back, push-up, kick your feet forward, squat, and jump. But when repeated in sets, this movement leaves people writhing on the ground because your body has to quickly provide a lot of energy to the muscles, leaving your body feeling exhausted and making it difficult to fathom doing another burpee.
This seems logical considering the burpee was not created to be performed in continued repetition. Way back in 1939—years before Jack LaLanne bothered with jumping jacks, and decades before Arnold Schwarzenegger started pumping iron—Royal Burpee was working double duty as the executive director of a YMCA in New York City and a Ph.D. candidate in applied physiology at Columbia University Teacher’s College. And as part of his doctoral research, Burpee was dedicated to figuring out a method to evaluate a person’s physical fitness. Burpee would measure someone’s standing heart rate, have them do four burpees, and then measure how long it took for their heart rate to return to normal – the faster, the more fit the person.
While Burpee himself never intended the movement to be used as an exercise to get in shape, the burpee today has found its way into countless modern workouts, the military, and gyms across the country.
Don’t avoid the burpee because it has a bad rap. It’s time to give it a second chance. The personal trainers at Success Studio are happy to get you started. Just click the button below for a complimentary assessment.
I am curious to know, do any of you love burpees? Or do you just love to hate them? Please share your stories in the comments section below.