Using burpees to lose fat is very challenging and will give you a very fast result.
In short, a burpee is where you start in a standing position, squat down, get into a pushup position, return to a squat position, and then come back up to a standing position. Sounds pretty easy, right?
However, simple exercises lead to challenging workouts! Because the exercise is simple in nature, it is very safe to use for high repetitions, high intensity, and high fatigue. However, that doesn’t mean you can completely ignore your technique, don’t let your hips sink into the pushup position and if your back, shoulders or knees start to hurt, drop it a bit.
Burpees to lose fat: sample exercises
Tabatas – Using this format is a quick and challenging way to exercise. The ‘tabata protocol’ has you perform eight rounds of twenty seconds of maximum intensity with 10 seconds of rest. Then it will look like this; Burpees for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, repeat another seven times. Sounds pretty easy, give it a try and let me know what you think!
The key with using this training format is that the 20 seconds of work has to be all you have. You won’t get the same fat burning results if you skip the work period. By the end of these four minutes you should be exhausted!
100 Rep Challenge – Again, simple in design, but be careful with any workout that involves the word “challenge”! As you may have guessed, you will be doing 100 burpee repetitions for time. 100 burpees in 10 minutes is fine, 5 minutes is fine, and less is great. If you’re knocking them out quickly, try some of the more difficult burpee variations.
Stairs: Just like with a normal ladder, you can go up or down. This works well by pairing the burpee with another exercise such as shadow boxing for time, or simply with a rest between ‘sets’. Walking up the ladder will look like this: 1 burpee followed by a 10 second rest or shadow box, 2 rest burpees or shadow box, 3 burpees, etc. Moving down the ladder, you’ll start with 10, 15, or 20 burpees and work your way down to 1. One to 10 (or 10 to one) will give you 55 total reps and is a great number to start with.
The best way to add fat-loss burpees into your workout routine is to do them as a finisher after your regular weights session, or you can do them on a separate day for extra conditioning. Pick one of the above methods and use it for a couple of weeks and try adding reps (tabatas or ladders), decreasing your times (100 rep challenge, ladder) or increasing the difficulty of the burpee variation. Overall, they will be a great addition to your fat loss workouts and will also improve your fitness faster than most traditional methods.