Burpees
The burpee is the ultimate full-body exercise. There’s a reason football teams, CrossFit practitioners, and elite military forces use the burpee in their workouts. Just one simple movement tests both your strength and aerobic capacities.
Burpee Variations
Basic Burpee. To perform a basic burpee, just follow these instructions:
- Begin in a squat position with hands on the floor in front of you.
- Kick your feet back to a push-up position.
- Immediately return your feet to the squat position.
- Leap up as high as possible from the squat position.
Burpee With Push-up. Perform the burpee normally, but after you kick out your feet to a push-up position, go ahead and do a full push-up.
Burpee With Hindu Push-up. Instead of just doing a full push-up, make it a Hindu push-up.
Burpee+Pull-up. Stand underneath a pull-up bar or tree branch that is high enough that you have to leap to reach it. Perform a burpee normally, but when you leap up grab the bar and perform a pull-up. Repeat. Did you hear that? That was the sound of your soul dying.
Possible Prisoner Workouts
As you can see above, you’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to exercises to create a bodyweight workout. Mix and match the exercises to your liking along with a set and rep scheme to create your bodyweight workout.
If you’re looking for a little guidance, though, here are a few suggestions:
Deck of Pain
This is supposedly a favorite workout routine amongst prisoners because they usually have a deck of cards handy.
Take a standard deck of 52 cards. Assign one of the above exercises (or one of their variations) to each of the four suits. So you could have something like:
- Clubs: Push-ups
- Spades: Pull-ups
- Diamonds: Squats
- Hearts: Hanging Leg Raises
Start drawing cards from the top. The suit tells you what exercise you’re doing; the number tells you the reps. Face cards count as ten rep; aces 11. So if you drew the 5 of diamonds you would do five squats; if you drew the king of clubs, you do ten push-ups. Draw the cards and perform the corresponding exercise and reps until all the cards have been drawn.
Finish it off with ten burpees for good measure
