The Burpee

THE BURPEE

There is probably no body-weight exercise which recruits more of your body's resources for a single rep than the Burpee. There is also (probably) no body-weight exercise which inspires more groaning, cursing-of-the-coach's-name, or dread than the Burpee. This of course merely serves to underscore its effectiveness as a training movement, because if it didn't totally suck to execute, it wouldn't be worth doing, would it?

There are numerous online resources which show you how to execute a Burpee properly; some of these are excellent and some are terrible. Anyone reading this blog has probably already done many hundreds 'neath my watchful eye, and if you haven't yet and aren't sure whether the tutorial video you just Googled is a good one (you haven't Googled "burpee tutorial video" yet? Go ahead, I'll wait... OK, good.) come on in and I'll teach you. I can say that the first few hits you just got are some interesting variations...

One thing is for certain; the burpee is tough to do quickly, because there are at least 3 full-body-length ranges of motion to move through! One tip to improve your 150 Burpees time is to skip the second position pictured above; if you have the coordination and strength for it, you can drop directly into the top of the Push-Up from the standing position.

Here are some fun variants of the Burpee:

• Long-Jump Burpee: the athlete jumps forward, not upward.
• Tuck-Jump Burpee: the athlete pulls his knees (tucks) to his chest while jumping.
• Jump-Over Burpee: the athlete jumps over an obstacle between burpees.
• Box-Jump Burpee: the athlete jumps onto a box, rather than straight up and down.
• One-Armed Burpee: the athlete uses only one arm for the whole exercise including the pushup.
• Dumbbell Burpee: the athlete holds a pair of dumbbells while performing the exercise.
• Parkour Burpee: following one burpee on the ground, the athlete jumps upon a table and performs the second burpee on the table, then jumps back to the initial position
• Hindu Push-Up Burpee: instead of a regular push up, do a hindu push up
• Pull-Up Burpee: Combine a pull-up with the jump or do a pull-up instead of the jump.
• Muscle-Up Burpee: Combine a muscle-up with the jump or do a muscle-up instead of the jump.
• Double Burpee: Instead of one pushup do two in a row to cancel the drive from landing after the jump and to make the next jump harder. Each part of the burpee might be repeated to make it even harder.

If you're not up to those yet, or indeed even a standard Burpee, you can scale it in several ways: by doing the Push-Up portion as a Knee Push-Up, by stepping into the bottom of the squat instead of jumping there from the Push-Up position, etc.

If you're ever stuck for a workout (on the road, don't have time to get to the gym, snowed in, barricaded in a shopping mall during the Zombie Apocalypse) you can find some good Burpee workouts in our Portable Workouts section.

Want to make your Burpees easier to execute? Try this: over the course of your day, every day, periodically bust out 3-5 Burpees. It's up to you to find a time and place (doing this in the check-out line at the market might get you some stares and if you choose to do this, please, PLEASE have someone on hand with camera-phone so we can post the video), but make sure you get at least 5 sets in per day. After a week, add a rep or two to each set. Do this for 2 months. Then, go for a set of 20 and see how much easier it is.