Burpee routines

[ebubekirozkan]

Hi guys, here are some way you can program burpees. The routines all target your body slightly different, use it for inspiration for your own approach.

Reverse ladder (prison style)

Start off with a number of burpees you are comfortable with doing, like 15 (beginners start at 5).
After each set you rest 1 minute and then do a set with one less burpee, until you get to one. Sets are like this: 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, adding up to a total of 120 burpees.
Progression:
1. reduce time between sets, for each workout take 10 seconds off the rest time
2. Increase the ladder (to 16 here) until you can start from 30 burpees

Setting to one hundred: (hypertrophy and muscle endurance)

Do a set of 5 consecutive burpees. Keep the time between these very short and snappy. Rest for two minutes. Repeat this 4 times for a total off 5x5=25 burpees.
Progression:
1. Reduce time between sets with 10 seconds until you hit 1 minute rest
2. Add sets every workout until you can do 10x5 reps
3. Increase the number of reps every workout until you hit 10x10
4. Reduce rest time until you are doing 100 burpees consecutively
(This method works well for all variants)

Steady 100+ navy seals (muscle endurance)
Set a digital timerapp for 100 repetitions with 60 second rest inbetween and 15second active time. When the app tells you, do one navy seal. Rest. Repeat for 99 times. This will take you more than an hour at first.
Progression:
1. Decrease rest time every workout with 5 seconds until you hit 10 second rest time
2. Decrease active time from 15s to 10s
3. Increase the rest time to 30s and increase the number of navyseals for each rep
4. Decrease the rest time again every workout to a final 10 seconds
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4

Casino Royale (randomize intensity):
Get a deck of cards, shuffle. For each set take 1 card from the top, the value of the card is the number of burpees in your set.
A=1, J=11 Q=12, K=13. Rest for 1 minute. Do as many cards as you can.
Progression:
After you can clear the deck completely:
1. Change Aces to being a value of 14.
2. If that gets easy, change all face cards to 14
3. Increase the value of the number cards with 1

Dice roller: (randomize intensity)

Get two dice, roll them. Multiply the number you rolled with each other, that’s the amount of burpees in your set. So 6x6=36, 7x2=14 etc. For beginners who can’t do 36, halve these numbers. Throw the dice 5 times for 5 sets.
Progression:
1. Increase number of dice throws every workout until you can do 10 sets
2. Reduce rest time with 10 seconds every time
3. Increase value of the dice faces with 1

Tabata style (train for aerobic output):

Set a timer (or Tabata song). Do as many burpees you can in 20 seconds with very high intensity, then rest in place for 10 seconds. Repeat 8 times
Progression:

increase number of burpees in 20 seconds

Note: do this one once a week at the most, especially great approach if your bottleneck is your aerobic capacity

Pick one or two methods you like, stick with it and start improving your burpees

 

[missverena]

@ebubekirozkan I miss doing burpees. Been out of commission 2+ months with a shoulder issue

 

[madbird]

@ebubekirozkan

Setting to one hundred: (hypertrophy and muscle endurance)

Burpees are a shitty exercise in particular for hypertrophy.

 

[chris131326]

@madbird Iron wolf, Burpeesking and a million swole inmates would disagree with you

 

[ebubekirozkan]

@madbird If you think working toward being able to do 100 navy seal burpees (=300 pushups equivalent) consecutively does not induce hypertrophy, I don’t know what to tell you. Does it only target hypertrophy and is it the most efficient way to grow your pecs, well of course not. It all depends on your goals. I also do weight lifting 3-5x a week for those reasons.

And you can dislike burpees sure, most people do. There are more fun exercises, but I feel burpees have an unparalleled carry-over to normal life activities out of all single exercises you could do. That’s the reason they were invented in the first place, to assess a person’s conditioning and exercise capacity and it’s also the reason almost every military organization in the world implements them.

 

[madbird]

@ebubekirozkan Doing 300 pushups is also really bad if you want to achieve hypertrophy. My point is that you mentioned hypertrophy specifically while this exercise is just not suited for this purpose.

Everything always depends on your goals, that's true, and burpees are not a good exercise for most goals except being able to do a fuckton of burpees.

If you want to do a shitton of burpees, that's totally fine, so go ahead. I just wanted to mention here that burpees are, in most cases, a waste of your time.

 

[ebubekirozkan]

@madbird Well no, when doing burpees you can either aim for your failing point to be due to your muscular or your aerobic limits. Doing burpees in sets and working towards 100 will put the limit on your muscles and lean more towards hypertrophy compared to doing as much burpees as you can in a certain time frame (like with HIIT), where you would get gassed out before muscle failure. That’s where the distinction comes from.

Also doing navy seal burpees is more geared towards hypertrophy than a conventional burpee, this is not controversial.
It’s more of an emphasis that a specific approach leans more towards hypertrophy than a statement on burpees being the most effective way to achieve hypertrophy.

But you seem to be a beginner who doesn’t actually work out who larps online parroting some basic knowledge you have read without any actual arguments, so I won’t be arguing with you any further. Burpees don’t build muscle as effective as other exercises, yeah no shit dude

 

[franklampard14]

@ebubekirozkan We all appreciate burpees; we just emphasize that they're not for hypertrophy. You can't get super jacked by doing burpees; you'll end up with a warrior's body, lean and sinewy.

 

[imwildfire]

@ebubekirozkan

There are more fun exercises, but I feel burpees have an unparalleled carry-over to normal life activities out of all single exercises you could do. That’s the reason they were invented in the first place, to assess a person’s conditioning and exercise capacity and it’s also the reason almost every military organization in the world implements them.

I'm curious, could you give some examples of their carry-over?

I've always thought burpees mostly a conditioning exercise.

 

[captainiceberg]

@imwildfire I just use them once a week, primarily just to work on my lactate threshold and my VO2 max.