Six months ago, I didn’t know what a burpee was. Good times.
Generally I see these added in as part of a larger set of exercises (like in a WOD) but they also show up as “penalty” phases in various obstacle-style races, where if you can’t do the challenge you do burpees instead. Here’s the video:
Basic burpees
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqM9hKrP9Hc
I couldn’t find a better example than this one, but one of the tips my trainer gave me for high volume burpee work is to hinge at the hip on the way up – don’t do a full push-up, just get your shoulders up, and then you can snap the hips forward to get you into the jump position. It depends on what your goals are, of course – full push-ups will get you a better arm workout, but then things get harder later. In my opinion, the jump is the deadly part. Which brings us to the variants:
Bar-facing burpees
You can make this a lot harder by going straight into the jump-over part, or you can get up, jump, turn, and repeat. Oh, and I can’t resist this one – no way can these kids beat me!
Lateral burpees
In this variant, you’re using a bar (or some other barrier) but instead of facing the bar like in the previous example, you stay parallel to it and jump sideways over it. I’m not used to lateral jumps, so I found this one really challenging on my legs and lungs. I picked a video with overhead squats in there too just because I love overhead squats so much more than burpees, but also to highlight how easy it is to mix them into a workout.
You can do a workout of just burpees (this year’s CrossFit Open had a 7 minute AMRAP that I want to retry, except for the big part of my brain that doesn’t want to do it,) and they’re also common in “every minute on the minute” style WODS, where you either stop what you’re doing every minute to do some, or you do a single rep (say a deadlift or snatch,) some burpees, and then wait out the minute before repeating.
I hate these things, but that’s probably a sign I need to do more of them…