Previous installments of “Feel the Burn” can be found here. Last Time: Changing Your Body.
Jump around! Jump around! Etc. Plyometrics are something I, personally, am utterly atrocious at, having been magically born with literally zero explosive power. I have the box jump of a senior citizen. I could not dodge a wrench. You get the idea. Accordingly, I try to do them a lot, and they really are pretty fun. You’ll never get bored doing a plyo workout, but you’ll regret your wicked ways.
I’ve been getting some cardio-based requests, so here’s an at-home no-equipment mostly-lower-body plyometric workout that leaves me dripping and snorting and guzzling water, which I will help you break down into a less ridiculous form. This, incidentally, is what I would teach in a grade school gym class if some sort of Freaky Friday-esque condition caused me to find myself teaching a grade school gym class. Become again a little child, and remember how you bounced off things. LET’S FOCUS THAT ENERGY, CHILDREN. It’s really fun, I promise. It’s super hard, depending on how ambitious you want to be, but you’ll have a great time.
Now, before we get into this, let’s remember you have breakables. Don’t come crying to me in the comments because you broke your framed Leif Garrett poster. CLEAR SOME SPACE.
Let’s warm up, because JUMPING. I do not mean stretching, stretching cold is no good. Stretch later. When I suggest you warm up, that can be jogging in place for a little bit or five minutes on the elliptical or whatever floats your boat. Just something that makes you literally feel slightly warm and capable of movement. The warm-up I do for this particular workout is not really for the balance-impaired, but in case you’re feeling very BRING IT, go ahead:
Warm-up: Single Leg Squat Touches, fifteen per side. Do that three times. You’ll probably be noticeably better at one side than the other. Try to look in a mirror while you do these to keep your chest up, and because you’ll be less likely to fall on your face.
Now, the workout itself: Should you do this every day and also lift something over your head when the spirit moves you, you would actually get into pretty decent shape, which is nice. I do four sets, 15 reps of each exercise, unless otherwise indicated, but you’ll know halfway through the first one how many sets you can handle. Honestly, do a full set in the morning and a full set at night and work your way up, whatever. AND, let me be clear, I absolutely find myself taking little water breaks in the middle of each set, because I am no good at jumping.
PRIORITIES: Soft landing, taking it slow, listening to your body. Billy, don’t be a hero. Captain Superquads wants you to live.
(15) Broad jumps (the title of my future book about plyo workouts for women, but also this). You just jump forward. You’re familiar with jumping up, from weddings, now you jump forward and try to land softly. Squat down to explode up and out. You’ll be great at it. If you’re in a gym, just do it fifteen times in one direction. If you’re in your house, jump once, turn around, jump back. Easy.
(15) Squat jumps. Literally my least-favourite thing in the world. Squat on your heels, explode up, land on the balls of your feet, sink back down.
(15) Burpees. You have my permission to take like ten minutes to get your fifteen burpees in. I would give you fewer burpees, but they are SO GOOD FOR YOU. If you’re really finding them horrifically awful, I recommend doing a 100 Burpee challenge, which you can find support for all over the internet. This is when you do a burpee on day one, then two burpees on day two, then three burpees on day three, ETC, until we fast-forward the tape and you are a robot killer who can do a hundred burpees in a row.
(4 boxes of 4, each leg) Agility squares. Oh, these are fun!!! I love these. They’re basically single-leg hops, and you make an imaginary square which you hop into each corner of. Like HOP forward on one leg, that’s one corner, HOP LEFT, that’s the second corner, HOP BACKWARDS, that’s the third corner, HOP RIGHT, that’s the fourth corner. Then do that all four times. You never put the second leg down. Until you finish doing the whole thing, because then you do it on your other leg. It’s great!
(!6) Ski jumps. Go find a mountain. HA, fitness joke. Sorry. No, just put a broom or something down on the floor so it’s pointing away from you, and stand with your feet together on one side of it. Keeping your feet together in the air, jump sideways up and over to the other side of the broom. Like this, but with your feet together, because, for some reason, it feels more like a game if your feet are together.
(15) Tuck jumps. This is the canonical jumping of your youth, i.e. up in the air, but you try to kick yourself in the butt each time by, you know, tucking at the top. It looks like this. I do not get that kind of air, at least not after my first set.
(16) Lunge jumps. Or “jumping lunges,” whatever you call them. Do a lunge, leap out of it, switch your legs, land with the opposite leg forward. IF you are totally dead and hate me, you can just do this as non-jumping alternating lunges, I’m not a monster. Yeah, you may want to do that.
K, now do it at least once more, ideally three more times. You’re welcome!
Tags: feel the burn, fitness, jumping around, plyometrics
When I took ballet in college and we did jumps for the first time (imagine a class full of ready to graduate, just need a few more credits, sleepy 21 year old girls [ok fine there were TWO boys in class]), the professor played Michael Jackson to get us warmed up/used to jumping around. It was great and I highly suggest Michael Jackson to get yourself in the jumping spirit. Especially PYT.
And of course YAAY thanks for making a cardio routine for the at-home-we-hate-running crowd.
Yay, another FTB! My triceps are already looking better from the last challenge and I’m super excited to be a jumping, wheezing mess this evening after this one!
Do I have to wait until I do all this to grouse about it?
I mean “oh boy! This looks fun! Plus I get to watch my incessantly-moving 13yo accomplish it all with ease while I groan and pant! Let’s GO GO GO!”
FINALLY! YES! Thoughts on doing this in your apartment if you have a downstairs neighbor?
Oh God, don’t do it.
But if I do it at 5am they prob won’t even hear it because they will still be sleeping. Especially on a weekend!
What kind of floors do you have? If you don’t have carpeting of some kind, I would say don’t risk it. Many is the time I have been woken up by upstairs neighbors practicing their step-dancing or their Thai boxing or whateverthefuck.
(Do you think these exercises are safe to do in stocking feet? That would probably help too.)
Speaking as someone who used to go to a bootcamp where they made us do burpees on really wet. slippy muddy ground, I would suggest not.
Ugh, this is my issue too. It takes all the convenience out of it, even if I just have to put on some shoes and go downstairs to the parking lot.
I feel like this is just asking for injury. I am not the most graceful creature.
Yes, thank you! Plyometric exercises — especially ones that involve jumping — can cause very serious damage to bones and joints, especially knees, and they really need to be done under the supervision of a trainer. I too fractured a sesamoid bone (see below) and now have permanent knee problems as a result of trying to do this kind of exercise regime. I hesitated to write this comment, as I love this site and Nicole and I don’t want to derail… but I do want to issue a caution that a) this series offers a very specific variety of “feeing the burn” that is appropriate ONLY for certain types of people, e.g. people who are already fit and have no joint or knee issues; and b) it can be dangerous if not done properly and under supervision of a trainer. Other posters have raised these issues, and I would be eager to hear how Nicole would respond to those of us who can’t just “jump around” due to knee and joint problems (or, indeed, downstairs neighbors!). Of course it’s not her job to provide a customized workout for everyone, but I do feel that these workouts are designed for a fairly narrow cross-section even though they are presented as universally accessible.
If you are a reader of The Toast, you must do these exercises four times a day, no matter what your doctor says or how much your knees start bleeding, or your IP address will be immediately banned.
Ok, so I’m super excited about this, although I’m totally in agreement with corfay about the dilemma of doing this with neighbors and/or a 112 year old house that rattles alarmingly when jumped in.
I’ve been doing the previous workout daily ever since it came out and while I still can only do 48 seconds of wall sit, that’s better than the 8 I could do at the beginning. But screw downward dog pushups. Seriously.
Anyway, I’m really glad to be getting stronger, and I’m looking forward to some cardio variation. I’m sick of walking. Walking is boring.
also slanted floors just make it more challenging, right?
Me too, on the old, rattley house. It would probably be ok, but…
Downward dog push-ups are the focus of my incendiary rage, the kind of rage to which exploding suns cannot hold a candle.
(But they make wall sit seem palatable!)
“the exercise was named in the 1930s for American physiologist Royal H. Burpee”
DR. ROYAL H. BURPEE
ROYAL BURPEE!!!
If I had a name like that, I’d want to inflict horror on the world as well.
Just to tie it back to the earlier post about self-improvement and the potential intersection of physical self-improvement and religious/moral overtones, I’d like to say that whenever I feel like I’ve been slacking on the conditioning side of my life, I do burpee tabatas. Yep. Four minute conditioning workouts for me. I hope my downstairs neighbors don’t mind the sound of me flopping on the floor and jumping back up in 20 second intervals.
can you say some things about knees? cuz i have a weird knee from having runner’s knee awhile ago and not dealing with it properly, and also from being out-of-shape, and i feel like a couple of these workouts have seemed…knee dangerous? lots of squatting and lunging and jumping from squats, which i know TECHNICALLY these things are supposed to be okay if you’re doing them properly, but i’m never confident that when i get tired i’ll still be doing them properly.
Approach tuck jumps with caution if you aren’t confident in your pelvic floor.
Also no power lunges? They’re the best ones!
Ahaha your name is so appropriate for this comment!
I admit to some slight trepidation in this category. The last time I tried to jump rope, for instance, it got… messy. Kegels don’t really seem to help.
I’m never doing that exercise but I am now planning to walk around announcing how confident I am in my pelvic floor.
NICOLE NICOLE I DID 10 BURPEES IN A ROW WITHOUT STOPPING YESTERDAY. TWICE!
(that means i never have to exercise again .. right?)
Hey Nicole, sooo, this isn’t at all relevant to the topic at hand, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you/Captain Superquads for a while now and I’ve been waiting for the next installment of Feel the Burn to do so: can you recommend any ab/core exercises for someone who had a cervical spine fusion (horses!) ~8 weeks ago? All crunches and situps and similar are out — they put too much strain on my neck — and that pretty much exhausts my creativity. I’ve been doing lots of planks, but I can only do those for so long (that is, not very) and anyway some variation would be nice.
Thanks so much, and apologies for the non-sequitur! For now, I look forward to the day I’m freed from my low-impact-only shackles and can jump around with the rest of you.
Maybe look for some pilates videos online? I have a terrible back and go to a pilates place where the teachers are physios so they know what’s going to be a problem for you if you have a known issue. It’s generally ace.
ETA: if you’re looking for sick abs/ab definition, pilates won’t help, cos it’s not supposed to work the 6-pack muscles, rather the obliques and muscle behind the 6-pack.
If lying flat on the floor is okay for your neck, there are lots of sit-up variations and leg-lifting exercises that you can do staying flat on your back the whole time. I had a non-cervical spine fusion ages ago (scoliosis!) that left most of my spine in one piece, so all exercises that involve really curling your back are out for me (they don’t hurt, it’s just that when I try to curl my spine, my body reacts like I’m trying to curl my thigh, or my forearm–in other words, nothing happens) so I do flat-back sit-up variations when I feel like working my abs.
I agree with hurdyburdy about the leg-moving exercises. After reading some scary things about what they can do to your spine, I avoid a lot of crunch-type exercises. Balancing on a medicine ball (just sitting on it with your feet off the ground) works your core some. My club also used to do an exercise where you hold a sort of crunch position with your also legs up and bent 90 degrees. I don’t know if that would strain your spine too much, but it’s mostly static and your neck isn’t supposed to be bent much. I can describe it better if you’re interested.
After doing some research these are some exercises you can do for your core. There isn’t much else you can do besides planks I hate to say. You can start in a plank and move up into a pushup position and backdown repeating and alternating which arm you start with. You can also lift an arm or leg while you plank to add more difficulty. Side planks are also another great core exercise. A side plank variety is to take your top hand and reach under yourself as far as you can then back up to the top. Hope this helps.
If you do this a lot and then skate roller derby, you will have quads for days.
That should be my username here.
Dammit, I always think of these things too late.
Intense Debate lets you change your username without changing anything else.
Yes! Also these really help with agility and power for roller derby. My team does them after our warm up. I still hate them though.
Haha just a tad to late, because I am the Captain SuperQuads she is talking about in her posts. Sorry I beat you to it.
Question: what goes on my feet for this? My boyfriend is totally into the barefoot running thing and has me convinced that cushy shoes are the tools of the devil. When I do any kind of running (read, the first week of C25K and then I stop because it is the MOST boring thing ever), I wear minimalist shoes and have no problems. I love the idea of doing this jumpy workout for cardio instead, and I have a big empty barn with a concrete floor. Should I get some cushy sneaks for this? I am totally overweight and out of shape, btw.
CUSHY, SUPPORTIVE SNEAKERS. Doing plyo on a concrete floor in bare feet will fuck you up. Source: I once did plyo on a concrete floor in minimalist shoes.
Definitely wear good, cushy sneakers. I tried doing plyo in bare feet ’cause I was inside and too lazy to put on shoes and landed wrong on my toe. It was gross and swollen for a week.
I wouldn’t recommend doing this type of workout on a concrete floor. If you are overweight this will put a lot of pressure on your joints and you won’t feel so good the next day. Try doing this on grass, dirt, or a track if you have one accessible.
Oh, god, this will be new/ painful/ hilarious for me.
Curious as to how we should be fitting this in w/ the first workout. I’m trying to get into a routine and balance this w/ the occasional running I do (at best, three times a week). Alternate workouts daily? Try to do both in one day and take a break the next? Alternate running days?
Or, are these intended as solitary workouts we can just fit in as we see fit?
For a while, I’ve been doing running three days a week and a strength workout three days a week, alternating days. Then I take Saturdays off. Recently that’s been off-kilter because my strength workouts haven’t been challenging enough and I’m training for a 5-mile race so I want to run more, BUT – if you’re at a sort of steady, good pace on both kinds of exercise, I’ve found it’s great. It varies enough that you don’t get bored, and you get to rest the muscles you use one day on the next.
That sounds solid, thanks! Now to just motivate myself to do something (almost) every day…
Depending on your level of fitness I would I would do the first workout, rest a day, then this workout and so on and so forth. When you get into better shape you can just alternate days and rest when you see fit. Hope this helps.
I am so, so terrible at jumping. That probably means I should do this business.
Why are burpees? More specifically, why do I always fall over when I do them?
I always feel like the slowest loris of all at burpees.
I loved to jump when I was a little girl because I had no breasts then. Now, I’ve got a mountainous region. I have a great sports bra for jogging, but it’s not a miracle-worker. So basically, can I get out of jumping, gym teacher?
I have accepted that I am probably not going to get super into these workouts (small crowded room with minimal free wall/floor space, roommates, old house), BUT Nicole, I started doing Couch 2 5K! I am five runs in! I haven’t wanted to die once, and only hated myself a little twice! This is the last thing I ever though I’d do! I realized that I wasn’t actually super interested in being strong (plus squat/jump/whatever exercise is SO boring to me), but that maybe I would like to be fast! And I can run in the quiet mornings through my pretty autumnal neighbourhood blaring indie rock or post punk on my headphones and think quiet thoughts. My friends are all astounded, and I am also pretty astounded. Thanks for the encouragement!
Plyometrics is fantastic cardio and strength training for those without a lot of space and equipment. It’s also great if you’re like me and hate regular cardio like running.
I’ve been doing jump lunges, sumo squat jumps, burpees, etc. for the past few months. I have never been a jock and avoided working out like it was my job until recently. When I started doing plyo, I thought I was going to die, but I’ve slowly gained more endurance and strength. And I’ve developed some nifty new muscles in my thighs and arms. Just keep at it and your progress will surprise you.
Gahhh! Back in highschool I was involved in `AP Gym` (ha hahaha haha) and Plyo days on Tuesdays and Thursdays were the best in terms of fun and the worst in terms of having to jump for 45 minutes first period and never being able to stop sweating for the rest of the day. Going for a run after work with a friend, might have to convince him to do a circuit of this with me, if only for the benefit of passersby watching the two of us jump around.
and NEW CHALLENGE: `Burpee Mile
The athlete performs the Burpee exercise, then performs a Standing long jump. This sequence is repeated until the athlete has traveled one mile. Start with a shorter distance and set goals for yourself.`
I’m glad you posted this. I am going to try this, this weekend. Sounds a bit masochistic but should be fun. I will post back with my results pending I make it out alive.
Hey! I am super stoked to try this, but I am getting more concerned about my squat technique / chances of destroying my knees with poorly done jumps. Anyone got advice? I’ve been looking at youtube videos for technique advice, but I’m worried that won’t be enough, especially since I’m really shit at following body movement instructions…
So I guess I have two questions:
1. Anyone have advice on technique that I can follow on my own with a mirror? Or advice saying it’s stupid to try this?
2. Anyone have advice on finding a trainer who can help me with technique? For some reason going out to find these people fills me with deep terror. I am afraid I’ll find someone who’ll say JUST TAKE THESE STEROIDS AND JUMP UP AND DOWN ON ONE FOOT ON ROCKS FOR THE NEXT FIVE HOURS, you know? Like, are there questions people would usually ask / things to look for when you’re looking for someone to help with training? I know there are ace trainers out there!
I learned how to actually do squats ok with my trainer at my gym (free initial session gave me technique tips) (also I’ve worked with a couple of trainers since deciding my obese 40+ self needed some strength and energy – neither was into scary trainer nightmare things (though boy do they love smoothies, the trainers) and were great at going gently on my zero fitness level self.)
Anyway- squats. Weight on your heels, and grab some hand weights and let your arms hang down as you squat, really helped me with my posture. And don’t worry you’ll fall back and land on your butt. You’ll be sure you will but keep going back, you’ll be fine.
Try spreading the ground with your feet. Push outward to the side of your feet. And of course keep your weight in your heels. Go to parallel or just above if you are not there yet.
Oh Nicole, I tried this last night and got through approximately half of one set before falling down in a wheezy, sweaty mess. I’m going to keep trying and hopefully I’ll be able to make it through one set next week!
Oh man, if I wasn’t meeting with my trainer on Sunday, this would SO be my Saturday morning. Thank you for these! All your fitness posts have been awesome.
Ok so I am up at a telescope on Kitt Peak this week, observing most of the night while working my day job most of the day…it is about the unhealthiest thing ever, especially considering the terrible observatory food. I was sad about missing workouts for a whole week, but I am planning to do this workout in the control room tonight! Also push-ups. Gonna be the fittest nerd in town, yeah!
I did it! I am an elephant with balance issues! But I did it, two full sets.
The warmup almost made me throw in the towel. And fortunately the group X room was free so I could hide in there with all the helpful mirrors, but once I got into it I was having fun. And sweating like I was in a wool coat at the equator in, say, mid-March.
That sounds solid, thanks! Now to just motivate myself to do something (almost) every day…
This was the most fun cardio workout I’ve ever done! Normally I just do them because I feel good afterwards, but this one was fun during, too! I felt like a little kid jumping around!