Using burpees for fat loss is a great challenge and one that will deliver a very quick result.
In short a burpee is where you start standing, squat down, go into a pushup position, come back into the squat position and then back to standing. Sounds easy enough right?
Simple exercises lead themselves to challenging workouts however! Because the exercise is simple in nature, it is very safe to use for high repetitions, high intensity and high fatigue. That doesn’t mean you can completely disregard your technique though, don’t let your hips sag in the push up position and if your back, shoulders or knees start hurting drop it back a little.
Burpees For Fat Loss: Sample Workouts
Tabatas: Using this format is a fast and challenging way to workout. The ‘tabata protocol’ has you perform eight rounds of twenty seconds of maximum intensity with 10 seconds rest. So it will look like this; burpees for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, repeat another seven times. Sounds easy enough right, give it a go and let me know what you think!
The key with using this format of training is that the 20 seconds of work has to be everything you’ve got. You won’t get the same fat burning results if you cruise through the work period. By the end of this four minutes you should be spent!
100 Rep Challenge: Once again, simple in design but you need to be careful of any workout that involves the word ‘challenge’!! As you might have guessed you will be doing 100 repetitions of burpees for time. 100 burpees in 10 minutes is OK, 5 minutes is good and anything less is fantastic. If you are knocking these out in quick time, try some of the harder burpee variations.
Ladders: As with a regular ladder, you can either climb up or climb down. This works well pairing the burpee with another exercise such as shadow boxing for time, or just with a rest in between ‘sets’. Going up the ladder will look like this: 1 burpee followed by 10 seconds rest or shadow boxing, 2 burpees rest or shadow box, 3 burpees etc. Coming down the ladder you will start at 10, 15 or 20 burpees and work your way back down to 1. One up to 10 (or 10 down to one) will give you 55 repetitions in total and is a great number to start with.
The best way to add burpees for fat loss into your workout routine is to do them as a finisher after your regular weight session, or you can do them on a separate day for extra conditioning. Pick one of the methods above and use it for a couple of weeks and try to add repetitions (tabatas or ladders), decrease your times (100 rep challenge, ladder) or increase the difficulty of the burpee variation! All in all they will be a great addition to your fat loss workouts and also boost your fitness quicker than most traditional methods.
