Here’s How to Do a Burpee the Right Way, Once and for All
If you haven’t already been incorporating burpees into your workouts off the bike, you’re missing out. They’re a total-body, high-intensity exercise that gets your blood pumping and your muscles burning—and adding them to your routine can give your rides the boost you’ve been looking for.
That said, the burpee is a controversial exercise because unless you’re performing it with proper form, you won’t reap any of the exercise’s benefits—and worse, you might even be putting yourself at risk for injury. So we tapped Noam Tamir, C.S.C.S., founder of TS Fitness in New York City, and consulted the latest research to give you all the tools you need to confidently add burpees into your cross training sessions.
Burpee Benefits
According to Tamir, burpees are a total-body exercise that can be done anywhere—a bonus for us busy cyclists who often don’t have time to hit the gym after work. Burpees work your arms, chest, quads, glutes, hamstrings, and core. Plus, burpees are a plyometric, explosive movement, which translates well to powering up hills or sprinting to the finish of a race.
“A lot of people like [burpees] because they’re a challenge, and they feel accomplished when they do them,” Tamir says.
What’s more, burpees get your heart rate up, which increases blood flow to your muscles and back to your lungs, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Research backs up these benefits and more. A 2016 study published in the journal PLOS One found that doing 30 minutes of HIIT exercise each week can improve your overall fitness and muscle function just as much as doing 150 minutes of steady, moderate-intensity exercise each week.
Plus, regular burpees can help reduce your waistline: A 2019 meta-analysis published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that HIIT exercises like burpees are more effective at burning visceral fat—the type of fat that’s stored within your abdomen that surrounds a number of internal organs—than just endurance training or just strength training.
And a 2015 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that doing intense exercises like burpees can slash your risk of early death up to 13 percent.
[Looking to start cross training but don’t know where to start? The Beginner’s Guide to Strength Training will teach you all the fundamentals to get the most out of your weight session, priming you for stronger miles in the saddle.]
How to Do a Proper Burpee
When it comes to how to do a burpee, proper form is key. The burpee above is demonstrated by Meghan Hayden, a certified personal trainer at Performix House in New York City, so you can learn the proper technique. If you’re just starting out, you can modify this move by removing the hop at the end.
Here’s how to do it: Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. Hinge at the hips and bend knees to squat as deeply as you can and place your hands on the floor. Jump feet back to come into a high plank position (top of a push-up). With core engaged, bend elbows to lower chest to the floor, like a push-up. Press back up as you jump your feet back into a deep squat and jump (or stand) right back up, landing on the balls of your feet.
Tamir recommends capping your burpees to a maximum of one minute at a time, or else your form can start to slip—however, most people will burn out after around 30 seconds, he says.
“Your ATP system—the energy system that kicks in when your sprint or jump—runs out quickly,” he says. “Burpees are an anaerobic exercise, but people treat it like an aerobic exercise.
Doing burpees when you’re already tired—like in the middle or end of your workout—can also mess with your form. Bad form can mean a few things. One is unwanted compression and pressure on your shoulders. “A lot of people already have forward shoulders, so this could make that worse,” Tamir says. “You can create shoulder impingements or tear your labrum.”
Another issue? A lot of people start to “worm” during the push-up phase of a burpee when they become tired or don’t have proper form because they don’t have control of their body weight, according to Tamir. This can hurt your lower back. You want to keep your core engaged throughout the move.
Finally, if you land on your toes—rather than the balls of your feet—you’re putting a lot of pressure on your knees and not getting your glutes involved at all, he says. So aim to activate the glutes and engage the whole foot.
How to Add Burpees to Your Workouts
Tamir recommends doing 8 to 10 burpees after a mobility warmup (think: lunges and glute bridges) leading into your HIIT workout.
If you’re unable to do a burpee and want to work up to it, Tamir recommends the following tips to gain the strength, mobility, and body control you need in order to perform the exercise:
Start doing exercises such as planks, deep squats, negative push-ups and dumbbell thrusters.
Work on your explosive jump power with plyometric drills.
Instead of jumping in and out with both feet, step in and out with one foot at a time.
Focus on the quality of your reps as opposed to the quantity of your reps.
Once you’ve nailed burpees and are ready to kick your workouts up a notch, Tamir recommends trying out the following variations:
Dumbbell thruster into push-up
Burpee where you jump forward over a cone or barbell facing you
Burpee where you jump laterally over over cone or barbell next to you
Single-leg burpee
GIF: Julia Hembree Smith
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