Re-Thinking Burpees with Ultimate Sandbag Training | sandbag workouts

I like to believe in some form or another, every coach I have learned from has impacted our Ultimate Sandbag workouts in one form or another. What Coach Davies opened my eyes to was the idea of building foundations in a wide array of mediums. Improve the way we move, our conditioning, our ability to work in unpredictable arenas. Yea, sounds crazy, but funny enough this has become far more standard in fitness than it was thirteen years ago!

Hard to believe we have been teaching people the power of DVRT Ultimate Sandbag workouts for a decade now!

Even today, people think Ultimate Sandbag workouts are a bit strange. We don’t sit there and do the same exercise the same way. NO! We take movements and add a host of different ways to perform them and this is what makes Ultimate Sandbag workouts more powerful, more versatile, and heck, more fun!

I remember one of the most unusual methods Coach Davies used was a body weight circuit before his strength training training routines. These general warm-ups were full of calisthenics that would have flashed you back to your gym class days. No, not the cheesy modern classes that don’t allow you to climb rope or almost move without the fear of getting sued. Back in the day when physical education was really about physical education! All types of crawling, push-up, climbing, jumping patterns made up a brutal circuit that was so different than anything that was being done at the time!

Nowadays, most fitness programs are trying to squeeze in these ideas into their workouts, but again, become infatuated with exercises and not movements! They miss the point of what these exercises are suppose to build and just try to brutalize themselves with these crazy exercises. One such exercise is the burpee!

Where Ultimate Sandbag workouts can go when you nail the qualities of a good burpee!

Some may be surprised that they don’t see burpees a lot in our Ultimate Sandbag workouts. Burpees have become almost more popular than squats, bicep curls, or crunches in workouts. Yea, I like them more than those other exercises, but to be honest, I never thought they would be a popular exercise!

I remember burpees back from conditioning workouts in high school, but didn’t see them for some time until I came across Coach Davies’ workouts. In fact, no coach was talking about using them and didn’t see much value in burpees. It isn’t as though they are a new exercise after all. What Coach Davies brought back was not just burpees, but a purpose behind them.

When I spoke to Coach Davies about burpees he wasn’t doing them to just make people tired (although it does that very well), but about looking at hip mobility and speed. I try to remember that as I developed our Ultimate Sandbag workouts. Doing any exercise without purpose (no getting tired is not a legitimate purpose) is just doing “stuff” and rarely gets people to their goals!

Does that answer why we don’t see burpees more often in Ultimate Sandbag workouts? If you really think about it, yes! Burpees actually take a great deal of hip mobility, core strength, shoulder stability, and hip power. In Ultimate Sandbag workouts we build those qualities over time, unfortunately, in most programs though people just “jump” into performing burpees not paying attention to quality or purpose.

Think about it, burpees work on both a complexity and speed side of exercises. Something new for a lot of people, so we can actually use Ultimate Sandbag workouts to help people prep to get the benefit of burpees at the same time create some cool burpee variation. Far too often people get stuck just doing more or longer bouts of burpees and falling prey to the idea of being stuck in stupid simplicity. Let’s look at two different situations.

Prepping for burpees is important and I said Ultimate Sandbag workouts can really help, especially if we reverse engineer them. A burpee is a complex exercise because of all the moving parts and the speed component. We need the ability to have really mobile hips, strong core to decelerate our bodies, strong shoulders to keep us in good alignment, and powerful hips to bring us back up! If you think about it, we could create a great workout just by reverse engineering the burpee. Check out an example of Ultimate Sandbag workouts that do just that!

Ultimate Sandbag Workouts for the Burpee

Workout: 30 Seconds of Work, 30 Seconds of Rest

-Bear Hug Squats

-Lateral Bag Drag

-Front Loaded Good Morning

-Deceleration Lunge Clean

Repeat 3-5 times

Ultimate Sandbag workouts like the one above accomplish our goals of building mobility, stability, and explosiveness. Funny enough, I bet even those of you already using burpees would find doing this series above and then performing your burpees would get more out of the movement! Try it out!

Next time, I will show you how to use some Ultimate Sandbag workouts to create some pretty cool burpee variations that let you get far more out of the movement!