Burpees: The Love-Hate Relationship

I've been watching a lot of videos from this guy and I've started infusing burpees into my workout regiments 5 days a week.  Check out some of his regiments...they're legit.  I only had two issues thus far:  my knees and my wrists.  I got wrist wraps for the latter problem, and the first one I'm attributing to a combination of the frequency of my gym visits and perhaps bad form.  My knees don't hurt all the time, they're just a little achy in the morning.  Well, they were before I took an 8 day hiatus for vacay.  Been back at the gym for 2 days now and haven't had any problems, so I'm assuming it was just the frequency.

I don't really follow any of his workouts exactly, but I steal the moves and combine them with other things including some Insanity moves.

Yeah I said it...no shame in my game.

45 min of Cardio

But pretty much the goal is to keep your heart rate elevated for at least 45 min, so I've changed a few things to make sure that happens.  Before I started reppin' #TeamBurpee my heart rate would always decrease  during the weight lifting sessions in comparison to when I was doing cardio.  I would do the most strenuous cardio in the beginning of the workout and and disperse the rest of it in between the weights.  Now I do an intense warm-up...probably 10 min with my friend Mr. StairMaster, followed by my ab routine, then stretching.  This does several important things:

• Gets the heart rate up for the rest of the workout
• Gets blood flowing - which is important for those of us who sit on their butts all day
• Helps with stretching and making sure you don't stiffen up

Lower Back Tragedies

My biggest issue with cardio is my lower back.  It's always hella stiff...I can't even do a lap around a track without it stiffening up to the point where I have to stop running.  The real gag is, I'm not even tired.  So sad.  Milk Dud (my trainer buddy hook-up at the gym) said it could be because I need to stretch my hamstrings, glutes, or hip flexors, all of which stiffen up if you're sitting for hours at a time. 

So pretty much this damn job is ruining my body.  I can't with this place...

But I digress.

So far I've been having a lot of success with that.  I make sure to specifically work on my lower back, abs, and stretch them everyday.

If you don't burpee, I recommend you hop on it, no pun intended.  It really is a great total body workout.  Funk Roberts has like 104146 different kinds of burpees you can do, so I highly suggest you mix 'n' match and see which ones you like best.  I copied his style of doing 5+ exercises in a row, so I mix 'n' match myself without sticking to any particular order he's laid out.  I started with 2-3 sets of :30 each but now I'm doing :45 and 1:00 sets.  There's no set number of reps, just do as many as you can. I think the thing that was messing me up before was that I was taking too many breaks between exercises.  I was letting my heart rate drop back down, which meant I wasn't burning as much fat as I could have been.  Doing 5 exercises like this for :45 or 1:00 will have you thinking death will come faster than weight loss, trust me.  But it will be worth it in the end.  Here's a link to his website.  He's pretty legit.  Somewhere on there is a link for a free meal plan and a bunch of workout info.  It's legit, too, and it's all free - that's my favorite word.  Let me know if you can't find the link and I'll send you the PDF files.  If nothing else, the dude is good for exercise ideas, which is exactly what I was looking for when I happened upon him on YouTube.

P.S. - If you do the burpees correctly, you will tire quickly and your body will ache the next day.  This is a good thing.