How to break a sweat without leaving home

Jan 02, 2013 5:41 AM by Audrey Luzader

Posted in How-To / Health & Fitness How-tos

How To...
Do Burpees

No matter how much you want or need to go to the gym, sometimes your jam-packed schedule just won’t allow it. Instead of blowing off your workout completely, try burpees, a great cardiovascular exercise that will get your heart rate up even when you’re crunched for time.

Woman doing burpee

Step 1: Start position

You’re going to start by simply standing up straight. Make sure you’re in an open space with plenty of room to move and jump without knocking anything over or injuring yourself.

Step 2: The motion

Going from the start position, squat down, place your hands on the floor and kick your legs out behind you. After doing this you should be in the starting position for a push-up, with your palms flat on the ground, arms locked and your legs extended fully behind you. Then bring your legs back in underneath your body like you’re in the bottom of a squat. From there, jump up, reaching towards the ceiling.

Step 3: Finish position

You will finish back in standing position. Make sure when you land back on your feet from the jump that you land as softly as possible to absorb the shock and protect your knees from injury. Once you have finished the entire movement, go directly into the next burpee until you have completed the full set, from 10 to 20 repetitions.

Tips

All of these steps should flow together as one continuous motion with no stopping or pauses in between motions. Take a short break between sets. If you’ve mastered burpees and are ready to take your workout to the next level, burpee pull-ups are a great exercise that will definitely challenge your body. These are like regular burpees except you do them underneath a pull-up bar. When you jump up out of the squat, you grab the bar and pull yourself into a pull-up using your momentum to carry you up. This exercise will need to be done at a gym or wherever you have access to a pull-up bar.