Burpees: The Explosive Exercise That Builds Strength, Power, and Cardiovascular Endurance

There are two versions of this exercise…

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…One includes a pushup (shown above), and one leaves the pushup out.

One of the things I like about burpees is that one doesn’t need any equipment or a special place to do them. They don’t require any challenging skills, and unlike the pull-up (one of my favorites), burpees don’t require as much upper-body strength.

Because of this, burpees are an ideal choice for everyone.

Now, if you think burpees are for wussies, I can assure you that they are a stand-alone, full-body exercise and one of those “if you can only do one exercise, what would it be?” classics.

In my US Marine Corps boot camp days, burpees were a “finisher” in morning calisthenics. In this case, finisher means the final exercise and also means that they finish you off.

Burpees are tough; they build strength and endurance.

Total-body workouts include legs, chest, and back. Burpees make the grade.

Why is a burpee a total body workout? It combines a squat, a plank, a push-up, and a jump into one fluid movement.

Let’s look at these individually and in more detail.

Squat:

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If you draw an imaginary circle around your body, starting at the bottom of your ribcage and encircling the lower third part of your back, everything from that circle down benefits directly from a squat.

You can see from the above illustration that your leg contains a lot of muscle, especially the quadriceps and hamstrings. Importantly, though, don’t forget the gluteals.

Most of us consider squats to be leg and butt exercises. They are, but there’s a lot more. The spinal erectors of your lower back, and the muscles of your lower abdomen, give you lots of stability, and the muscles in your pelvic floor (the ones you probably never think about) help you with defecation, urination, and not surprisingly, sexual function and orgasms.

Planks

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Planks kind of speak for themselves; the entire body is involved, but especially the chest and abdominals. If you hold a plank long enough, your body begins to sag, telling you that your abdominals and chest are being sapped. This makes traditional planks primarily a frontal upper body exercise.

In a burpee, however, the plank position is not held long enough to stress the muscles involved into failure. In a couple of seconds, you will do a pushup and pull your lower body back into a squat position.

Pushup:

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This is an arm, chest, and upper back exercise with emphasis on the chest and shoulders. This step is sometimes left out of a burpee, but this is an injustice to the chest, arms, shoulders, and upper back (Back muscles not shown in the illustration).

Push-ups are a traditional exercise that targets the chest and the much-neglected triceps. (Yes, feel free to do more than one push-up if you like.)

From the pushup position, we retract our legs into a squat, ready to jump.

Jump up into a standing position:

This explosive leg movement primarily involves the glutes and quadriceps.

At this point, you have completed your burpee and are in the starting position for doing some more.

Summary:

Here is an excellent instructional video on how to do a proper burpee.

Burpees develop balance and coordination as well as strength. When you start doing them, you might feel clumsy at first, but with a little practice, you will “feel the flow.”