How to do Burpees

Difficulty: Hard

Impact Level: High

Target Body Parts: abs, triceps, upper back, lower back, chest, shoulders, calves, glutes, hamstrings, quadriceps

Instructions

Begin in a standing position with your feet at shoulder width, crouch down and put your hands on the floor underneath your shoulders. From there take your weight into your hands and shoulders and jump your feet out behind you to straighten your legs. At the same time, bend your elbows and lower your upper body to the floor like doing a push up – chest in between your hands. This is the bottom point of the movement and should be the same as the bottom point of your push up.

From the bottom press your upper body back up away from the floor, by pushing down with your hands. As this happens, jump your legs in underneath you, landing with your feet at shoulder width. Transfer your bodyweight back into your legs and stand up as if you are doing the upward part of a squat. As you stand up jump up and clap your hands above your head.

As you land back down, go straight into your next burpee by crouching down and putting your hands back to the floor.

The burpee is a complex movement when done dynamically with a flow to it, so it is important to keep your core muscles braced when jumping your legs out and in, as well as when lowering your chest to the floor.

How to make Burpees easier

The burpee can be broken down into three sub-movements: a jump squat, a jumping plank and a push-up. So make sure you check out these exercises in our library first and get comfortable with them before trying to put them all together as a burpee.

If you can’t do a full push-up you can put your knees down and do a push-up on knees as part of your burpee to make it more manageable.

Squats

Jump Squats

Jumping Planks

Push-ups

Push Up on Knees

How to make Burpees more challenging

There are two great ways to intensify your burpees. The first one is to increase the height of your jump at the top of each burpee. Try jumping up onto a step, or a stable bench, or jumping sideways. Just make sure you step back away from the step before lowering down into your next burpee so you have space between your head and the step as you lie down.

The other way is to add in some more advanced variations to the push-up part of the movement, for example, diamond push-ups, wide arm push-ups or spiderman push-ups all work nicely as part of an advanced burpee.