The burpee is a fantastic bodyweight exercise that I use a lot within my circuit classes as well as with personal training clients.  It works many of your major muscles including your legs, chest, shoulders and core as well as your heart and lungs. There are many different versions of this exercise and in this post I will look at the 3 most common ones.

Basic Burpee:

This is one of the easiest versions of the burpee but is still a tough exercise particularly on the legs and heart and lungs.

: Begin in a standing position

; Squat down and place your hands on the floor

: From here jump your legs out behind you to full extension

: Jump your legs back in and stand up back to your start position.

Burpee with press up:

This exercise will also work the muscles of the chest, shoulders and back of your arms. Perform the exercise as above but this time as you jump your legs behind you perform a press up. As you push yourself back up from the press up jump your legs back in and immediately stand back up to the start position.

Burpee with press up and vertical jump:

This version is very demanding as it adds another explosive movement at the end of the exercise. Perform it as above but this time rather than standing back up, jump into the air has high as possible.

Other variations:

Easier option: Squat down and place your hands onto a step box in front of you and perform the burpee from here without the press up or jump. The higher the box the easier it becomes.

Harder options:

Burpee to pull up. Perform a full burpee under a pull up bar. As you jump up grab the bar and do one pull up before dropping back to the floor and repeating.

TRX Burpee. Perform the exercise with one foot in both the foot straps of a TRX suspension trainer. This will test your balance and stabilisation and work your core harder than a normal version.

Single leg. Stand on one leg and perform a full burpee keeping the other leg off the ground throughout the entire movement including the press up and jump. Again this will test your core and balance more than a normal one.

Sample workout:

Here is a bodyweight circuit that uses the burpee. Complete 10 reps of each exercise and at the end of the circuit rest for 1-2 minutes and then repeat.

Burpee

Single leg squats (10 per leg)

Wide hand press up

Double leg squat thrusts

Lunge (10 per leg)

V-ups

Squat jumps

Superman’s

Burpee Hell challenge:

Once you have mastered the burpee then why not give this simple but very tough challenge ago. All you need to do is complete 100 burpees in your fastest time. If you can perform 100 full burpees complete with press ups and jumps in less than 10 minutes then you really are a fitness challenge warrior!!