Burpees are a combined exercise of jumping, squats, planks, and pushups all at once. It engages most of the body's muscle groups. Doing these moves consecutively is tiring, but the exercise has many benefits as it builds strength while burning calories and improving cardio fitness.
Find out how to perform a burpee correctly and its health benefits.
Benefits of Burpee Exercise
Burpees are a calisthenic exercise, which means they utilize your body weight to train your body. The focus of burpee training is to build strength and endurance in the upper and lower body muscles, including those in the legs, hips, buttocks, abdomen, arms, chest, and shoulders.
Helps with fat-burning
According to experts, people weighing about 70 kilograms who do burpee exercises for at least 20 minutes can burn about 250 calories. Incorporating it into HIIT workouts can increase your fat-burning amount.
Improves cardiovascular health
In addition to burning fat, regular burpee training can help improve cardiovascular health, including:
- Healthier heart and lungs
- Improved blood flow
- Lower risk of heart disease and diabetes
- Lower blood pressure
- Manage cholesterol levels
- Improves brain function
Trains muscle endurance
Apart from improving cardiovascular health, burpee exercises also improve muscular endurance including core muscles, leg muscles, and arm muscles. This helps you to go about your daily activities with greater ease and reduces the risk of injury.
Improves coordination
Burpee exercise is an exercise that requires good coordination. Doing this movement regularly can improve your coordination, especially in performing daily activities.
Trains upper body strength
Since it involves pushups, burpees can help build upper body strength, especially the chest, triceps, and shoulders.
Read More: How Many Calories Should Be Burned Every Day To Weight Down?
How to Do a Burpee
It's important to know how to perform the burpee correctly, to prevent injury and get the maximum benefits. Here are some of the steps of the burpee:
- Stand with feet together
- Jump up while raising your arms above your head
- After jumping, lower your body down to a plank position. Keep your body straight from head to toe and pull your abs in.
- From the plank position, do one pushup
- After the pushup position immediately push the body up again to a standing position with the legs together. The movement of returning the body to the standing position involves jumping
Burpee movements can be combined with a plyo box, bench, bosu ball, or dumbbell. Start with low reps and see how many sets you can do. Avoid pushing yourself when any part of your body is sore and don't go too fast especially when switching to a plank position. For safety, consult a doctor before practicing burpee moves.
If you need medical advice or consultation, you can either visit a doctor or make use of the consultation features that are available in the Ai Care application by downloading the Ai Care application from the App Store or Play Store.
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- dr. Siti Marsiana Meriam
Cleveland Clinic (2022). How to Correctly Do a Burpee: Step-by-Step Instructions. Available from: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-to-do-burpee/
James Roland (2019). The Benefits of Burpees and How to Do Them. Available from: https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-do-a-burpee
Amanda Capritto, ACE-CPT, INHC (2020). How to Do Burpees. Available from: https://www.verywellfit.com/how-to-do-burpees-5076186
Shannon Johnson (2020). What is calisthenics?. Available from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/calisthenics