An effective fitness exercise workout at home could be short, brief, and intense all at the same time. It doesn’t take dozens of bodyweight exercises or a plethora of “secret” and fancy movements from Wing Chun Kung Fu to get your heart pumping. Make no mistake but be informed.
photo credit: spjwebster
Now you’ve probably heard of the 100 burpees workout lately if you’ve dabbled in bodyweight training. This workout only requires you to do one exercise, the burpee, and use one “equipment,” the floor. Be informed and realize you can get a highly challenging workout with no equipment. The requirements...only you and a stable ground/floor/platform.
Yes, you can definitely get a lung-coughing workout with the bare minimum, especially if you’re short on time. You can come up with simple workouts that can be as intense as you allow by putting in some serious effort. As an experiment, drop down on the floor and crank out pushups, flutter kicks, and chinups back-to-back with no rest to positive muscle failure, meaning crank out as many reps as possible until you can complete a single rep with good form. And better yet, set a time of 15 minutes and see how many reps you can do in that period.
To further increase the intensity of this circuit session (intensity is defined with respect to effort in this case, not the intensity definition based on 1 RM, repetition maximum), increase the time to 20, 25, or even 30 minutes. Do nothing in that time but pushups, flutter kicks, and chinups in circuit fashion with as little rest as possible. Let's see how well you can take it! 
I bet you’ll have a much different view of simple bodyweight workouts afterwards.
Always think quality over quantity. When all else fails, take a minimalist and no-nonsense approach to training. Don’t underestimate burpees.
You might be thinking…how could a one-exercise workout be as intense as those routines from fully-equipped gyms housing barbells, dumbbells, and cable machines?
Try this burpees workout yourself. Don’t just take my word for it. Let actions speak.
It’s called the 100 burpees challenge, recently popularized and “rediscovered” by the highly regarded trainer Ross Enamait from Rosstraining.com
Using a density approach, the goal is to perform 100 reps of burpees as fast as you can with as little rest as possible. You’ll minimize the rest periods. Break the routine down into sets of 8, 9, 12, 15 or whatever amount of reps you can handle. Have your training partner (if you have one) count the reps for you so you can fully concentrate on inching out every single repetition.
Breaking down the entire 100 rep workout into successive sets of 5, 7, 9, 10, reps adds a high intensity element into the workout. High intensity interval training or HIIT workouts are superior for shedding fat and maintaining lean muscle mass.
You actually burn more calories after a HIIT workout than traditional slow to moderate boring monotonous draggy cardio lasting 40-60 minutes. Metabolism and basal rate of burning calories remains elevated for up to 48 hours after interval training.
Anaerobic conditioning as well as aerobic conditional also improves. In other words, you’ll program your body to handle more work, by doing more reps, sets, or exercises, for future workouts. Think about this. If you can do more work, you’ll burn even more calories per workout. You’ll be able to train longer while staving off excessive fatigue.
It’s a gain-gain situation when you invest at least 10-15 minutes per week just on a high intensity interval training workout
Now aim to complete all 100 repetitions quickly and as fast as you can. Maintain good form throughout the movement. Avoid cheating with violent jerks, bouncing, and momentum. That’s it. Simple and brief.
A good goal for a beginner is to finish all 100 reps in under 10 minutes. You may advance from there and challenge yourself to finish in under 8, 7, or even 5 minutes for progression.
Use a stopwatch, clock, alarm, or gymboss interval timer to keep a countdown time. The gymboss timer allows you to program successive time intervals so you don’t have to interrupt your workout to monitor the clock or watch.
Now, if you completed all 100 repetitions in 9 minutes and 30 seconds, try to finish at least 10 seconds earlier to 9 minutes and 20 seconds the next time you do this workout.
Progression is key.
The body habituates and adapts fairly quickly to repeated training stress so you’ll have to constantly improve upon your personal records. Another way to progress is to do more repetitions in the same time period. Instead of doing 100 repetitions in 10 minutes, try for 110 reps in 10 minutes. Be creative with this workout. It’s fun.
Here’s a video link demonstration of a burpee by Ross himself
And check out this youtube video courtesy of Crossfit for walk-thru instructions on proper burpees execution:
Burpees aren’t as technical as barbell squats and deadlifts. In fact, most bodyweight exercises aren’t difficult to learn. It just takes conscious practice to monitor form.
The burpee is a full body conditioner, allowing you to build muscular endurance, strength endurance, improve cardiovascular capacity, and raise general conditioning and fitness level. With all the benefits, why wouldn't you put burpees into your training sessions?
Here’ s a 4-step rundown on executing a burpee:
1) Squat all the way down until hamstrings are touching and pressed against the back of your calves. Keep your fingers on the floor. Your head and eyes should be looking straight forward. Back relaxed. This is the starting position
2) Kick your legs back and get into a pushup position. Don’t over-arch the back.
3) Drop down and do a pushup. As you come up, kick your legs back into starting position (step 1).
4) From starting position, jump straight up in place as high as you can using your forefoot. While in the air, the arms can be either at your side or raised high for added difficulty. Land on the forefoot rather than the heel. Get into starting position again. This is one repetition. Now repeat until desired reps.
Remember to keep good form throughout. Quality over quantity.
My personal best was 6 min. 32 seconds from a year ago (2008) when I focused solely on body weight specific conditional training. Though lately, I’ve slacked off a lot on conditioning since getting back in a more bodybuilding-style approach to training. Nonetheless, 10 minutes is still quite easy to beat.
100 burpees looks and sounds easy but don’t trust me on word-of-mouth. It’s one of the best fitness exercise workouts at home that gets really addicting. I guarantee you’ll be gasping for breath with every muscle and inch of heart and lungs begging you to stop. You’ll hate and love it.
Now you can expand this method to other exercises as well. Use the 100 rep challenge on pushups, chinups, one-legged squats, and situps. The options are many. See how fast you can do all 100 reps.
If you’re a beginner or relatively new to exercise, start out lightly with a 50 repetition challenge. Let your body prime itself and adapt to the lighter training stress before moving onto more difficult and intense protocols. After a few workouts, 50 reps will be cake.
You can also try mixing in other body weight movements with burpees (see 3-parts body weight exercise training guide). For example, use a full body, upper body, lower body, abdominal/core template for structuring your burpees + body weight routines.
Here's an example routine,
- full body exercise- burpees, do as many reps of burpees as possible in 20 seconds
- upper body weight exercise- hindu pushups , do as many reps as you can in 20 seconds
- lower body weight exercise- body weight squats, do as many reps as you can in 20 seconds
- abdominal- crunches, do as many reps in 20 seconds
* rest 20 seconds, repeat the entire circuit 4 times for a total of an 8-minutes workout.
Do these workouts in your home, at the local playground/football park, workplace (if your colleagues aren’t looking), or your front porch.
Don’t overthink or overanalyze this. Burpees routines aren’t anything new or revolutionary. Fighters and athletes have been doing this for years. Follow the example. Take lead.
Now get training!
Train Hard. Train Safely. Train Smart.
Feel free to contact Me at ZQH245@gmail.com or ZQH250@gmail.com if you have any questions, comments, or seeking additional advice.
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