In case you didn’t feel bad about your home workout after watching the video, then you either don’t work out at all, or this is a piece of cake for you. Either way, you can close this page 🙂
However, if you are dedicated to losing fat, and the video seemed like a challenge, I highly encourage you to give it a try and see where you need adjustments. If you’re a beginner, it’s likely that you’ll need a few.
There are many variations of the burpee from beginner to advanced. In order to get the most out of this exercise, you have to have an understanding of its nature and how to best incorporate it to your workout.
What You Need to Know About Burpees
Burpee is one of the most grueling exercises there is. The reason being is the high amount of physical work your muscles do during them. Work equals force times distance, and you cover a lot of distance with your muscles and also produce quite a lot of force.
Squatting down, you initially cover only a little spot, but then you forcefully extend to a pushup, the area of which equals your height. After a repeat backward you do it once again, this time vertically, and not only cover the distance of your height but leave the floor jumping for a brief second, even bring the arms up in an overhead clap. So it’s not only the amount of mechanical muscle work but also the added explosiveness that makes this exercise so challenging.
On one side you need this, because if you workout at home you have to make up somehow for the restricted equipment—unless you own one of those fancy garage gyms. If you can’t use weights, or just want to give your joints a rest, but still aim to wipe up the floor, make sure to establish true friendship with burpees.
So there is maximum distance mechanical work and plenty of force production. The third main factor why burpees are „widely popular” is the vertical elevation of the heart. Lay flat/horizontal and gravity won’t be an issue, but as you start rising vertically your heart needs to do double duty supplying blood all the way to your limbs and to the brain so you don’t faint. It responds by beating more rapidly making up for the less blood per beat.
Burpee and it’s variations are therefore one of the exercises that put the biggest burden on your circulation which is exactly why it’s so effective when it comes to burning fat. Provided you have a perfect technique you even spare your joints hence it’s still a bodyweight exercise.
Is It Safe for You to Do Burpees?
As you saw in the video, there are endless burpee variations, but what really makes it effective is the 3 factors discussed above. That being said, if you have knee or lower back problems you might want to scale back its difficulty.
In general, I would not recommend burpees to clients who have not been involved in physical activity for the past 3 months and/or are overweight. It can be really challenging to their cardiovascular system and joints. Start with steady state cardio.
Another consideration is the speed element. In order to harvest the maximum benefits of burpees, you have to do them explosively. Which requires flawless form and technique. Think about the overly mentioned example here; you can’t put a big engine in a car with a broken steering wheel and shoddy suspension and drive it like a sports car. Your muscles might be able to generate enough force, but if you don’t have the coordination/control, and you lack sufficient strength in your lats abs, hip flexors, ankles to name a few, it is a recipe for injury.
Don’t let this keep you away though, luckily, burpees have endless variations. With a few adjustments to technique and the help of even as simple an equipment as a chair, it’s really easy to match your preparedness.
Here is a video to give you a few ideas for regressions, making burpees less difficult and scalable:
Most Common Issues With Traditional Burpees:
- Hyperextended lower back during the pushup position as a result of a weak core.
- Kicking the ground, toes scratching the surface:
- Lack of horizontal pushing strength and power. When jumping back from the pushup phase to the squat stance you need to push yourself away from the floor high enough that you can clear the ground with your legs tucking under your body.
- For the same reason above, you need enough hip flexor strength to pull the knees up explosively and hip flexibility.
- You also need to pull your feet as close to your shin as possible in order to land on a so-called tripod foot—your bodyweight is distributed evenly between the base of the big toe, little toe, and the heel—as opposed to the balls of the foot.
- These issues are most prevalent among those who have trouble staying in a squat position with open hips, fairly vertical torso and stable ankles. So before challenging your sanity with burpees it’s strongly advised that you first have a strong comfortable squat position. One in which you can spend a minute without breaking a sweat, with your hips lower than your knees.
- Last beginner issue is that they are all over the place. Again, typically when catching the ground with their feet in the squat position. Burpee is a repetitive exercise with lots of volume. Because of this and it’s explosive nature, you want to arrive at the same exact and perfect squat stance with your feet rep by rep.
Because of the above factors, many health experts leave burpees on the table when it comes to level it’s potential risks/rewards until the client achieves the adequate level of fitness.
A Thought About Variety
Burpee is considered a high-intensity exercise and was designed to be performed that way in order to utilize its maximum benefits. And that calls for a HIIT protocol (high-intensity interval training), which basically means you perform an exercise—preferable a whole body exercise—alternating between very high and very low intensities.
How long you stay within these intensity zones depends on your fitness level, but generally, if you’re a beginner, start out with a 1:4 or 1:3 work to rest ratio, provided your interval training is based on time (as opposed to heart rate method, when the duration of your rest between intervals is the time it takes to reach a predetermined lower limit of a heart rate level). As your conditioning improves you can push longer work sets to the point where they exceed the time of the rest intervals, typically a 2:1 work rest ratio, like the famous Tabata routine.
Interval training is said to burn more calories than a steady state cardio workout. Because it is bigger stress to your system, it takes more calories to recover from a HIIT session than from moderate intensity training.
So it makes sense to ask, why not just do HIIT training from now on? Because it is a double-edged sword, and you need to see the big picture. What makes it so effective also limits how frequently you can incorporate such sessions. If it takes too much time (2 or more days) to recover from a workout at the end of the week you will end up with less work done. This is especially the case if you do weight training as well. Doing HIIT training too frequently will take away time from training that would otherwise also be beneficial because it could, for example, build more muscle which burns more fat, etc.
Also, incorporating more steady state, long duration cardio builds your aerobic capacity which indirectly improves your performance at high-intensity training. It clears away faster the metabolic byproducts of anaerobic training while recharging enzymes and chemicals needed for powerful muscle contraction, all of which burpees heavily rely on.
How to Implement Burpees in Your Workout
Provided we talk about the traditional burpee, it includes a pushup element which is often a limiting factor not just for beginners, but seasoned gym-goers alike.
Sticking with a traditional style of burpee, you not only need to accelerate your body off the floor but also need to decelerate on your way back as you catch the ground with your hands and start the descent (unless you do Crossfit style burpees, where you don’t control the lowering portion of the pushup as much, just sort of drop your body to the ground to save energy). A controlled deceleration (eccentric phase) is quite taxing to your muscles.
For this reason, you want to go easy with burpees if you plan on lifting heavy the next day, or have a workout that either consist of upper body horizontal pushes, or leg presses (of course it depends on the volume and complexity of these exercises, but you get the picture).
As burpees are quite a challenge to your nervous system as well, it’s best to keep a day between your intense burpee session and your other workout that would consist of exercises that require complex motor control or if you are learning a new movement. Having a day off to rest, you will be able to show higher performance in your consecutive workout, which is what you should be after.
To Wrap It Up
Overall, burpees can be a valuable addition to your training routine if you:
- Meet the physical prerequisites to do them safely, a base level of conditioning
- Have the required flexibility
- Have the required strength
- Have proper technique
- Perform them with high intensity, explosively, when applicable (advanced versions)
- Incorporate them smartly in your workout plan, not to interfere with other training goals
I hope you find this article helpful. Have a great day!
