You are now in your squat. You are settled in and ready to move on to stage 2 of your 6 count Burpee. It’s Time to jump back.  A cue to help you shoot your legs back is to use your hamstrings. Those are the muscle in the back of your thighs. Shoot your legs back and “stick” a solid landing. Abs tight, legs straight, head in line, shoulder blades solid. Now….that’s a good jump back, but a lot can go wrong to spoil it or it just might be way too advanced for you. At least at this point.

Let’s see what spoils it first. There is a lot going on in a jump back. You are rapidly changing from a squat to what is essentially the top portion of a push up. This is also called a Yoga plank position. It’s called plank because you are solid and straight like a plank. If your shoulders are weak and/or tight. If your low back and hips are tight or if your abs are weak you are going to struggle. I have also found that many people, especially women nowadays, have weak and painful wrists that don’t like supporting weight this way. Have no fear there are exercises, drills and solutions for all of this. Well, ok you can have some fear, but do it anyway. Ok?

For the weak shoulder problem you need to watch Fusion Fitness TV episode 2. In that episode you will learn about the walk out.  Walk outs do a lot to strengthen weaknesses around your shoulders. Funny enough this goes back to being a kid again. Just like squatting. When we were very small many of us begin strength development in our upper bodies by crawling. Fast forward many years ahead and you may find that kind of strength is pretty much gone. Walk outs help build some of that strength back. I get a kick sometimes out of having adults do “crawls” as part of their work outs. Keep in mind that this is crawling with just their hands and feet on the floor. Their knees don’t touch. Well, heh heh, they may get about halfway across the room and become very surprised with how difficult this is. It’s a real eye opener, but it works. Arms, shoulders, abs and legs are all working. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. We may even feature this exercise and a few of it’s many permutations here on future episodes of FFTV.  Back to the walk outs.

This was how I did it!

In FFTV  episode 2 there is a lot said about shoulders and elbows. A lot of people exercise their shoulder wrongly. Painfully. One reason is because many of us walk around all day with all kinds of muscular imbalances and then try to pile exercise on top of them.  At the very basic level there are really 2 shoulders positions. Disconnected and connected. You want your shoulders to be connected to you.  I am sure you have seen people with disconnected shoulders. Their shoulders are rounded forward, and hiked up towards their ears. The pits of their elbows facing each other, and upper back slumped forward. Rounded, kind of like a camel. As you are doing your walk outs be conscious of pulling your shoulder and shoulder blades down towards your hips. Be aware if they are riding up towards your ears. Next, practice the drill seen in Epsiode 2. Squeeze and rotate the pits of your elbows forward. To help with this place your right hand right behind your left armpit. Now, hold your left arm in front of you with your elbow bent. Now lower that left arm (keeping your elbow bent) down towards your left hip. Actually squeeze the left arm down using the muscle you have your right hand on. Do you feel it working back there? This is the lat muscle. Now go back to Yoga plank and squeeze that muscle. It may take several tries but squeeze it and use it to help you rotate those elbow pits forward. Both these movements should help straighten out any hump in your upper back too. If not stay tuned for future FFTV episodes for more upper back training tips. For now hold a yoga plank and practice the shoulder position. Hold for time. See if you can eventually work up to 60 seconds. You may be very surprised how much your muscle will start shaking!

Tightness in your shoulders is another matter and while there are some very good shoulder stretches you could do, they really should be shown to you in, person, by someone who knows how to teach them. You may instead want to enroll in an Ashtanga, Bikram or Iyengar Yoga class. Also please make sure to watch future episodes of FFTV as there will be cool stuff about shoulder tightness and what to do about it.

If overall tightness is a big problem then once again I would recommend a yoga class. I myself, am partial to Power Yoga (the real name for it is Ashtanga) because that is how I learned to do it, and teach it. A great book on Power Yoga is available and written by Beryl Bender Birch called Power Yoga.  Easiest place to get it is of course Amazon. Squatting will begin to help you with the tight hips problem but you might have other issues that squatting doesn’t address so please don’t be shy to ask questions on the Fusion Fitness TV comment board. Once again though, Yoga (especially at the beginning of your fitness quest) will hit all these areas very well. Stay tuned to FFTV for more episodes on all this stuff.

If you have the painful wrist problem an easy way to get around that is to simply find your self a low and sturdy box of some kind. Something that is narrow enough so you can place your hands on the sides of the box. Your palms are on the top of the box but your fingers wrapped around the sides. This can take a lot of stress of the part of your wrist that is troubling you. All you need to do is use the box whenever you practice Burpees or walk outs or push ups.

The second part of the jump back is jumping forward to return to your squat. This might be the most difficult part of the jump back/forward. All the flexibility you are developing will be needed here. If you are not yet at that point what do you do? Walk outs of course! Practice walking in and out of your squat. You may need to put your hands on a box for quite some time as your hips open up and strengthen. Work to always come back into a good squat position. This is the stage of the Burpee where people usually get very sloppy and miss out. As you are walking forward into your squat pull your self down into it. Instead of  rushing things and excessively bending in your back work your hips here. Work then down under you to get there. Don’t try to bend and contort in your back first and then allow your hips follow and adjust. Use your powerful hips to help pull you into your squat. Of course…once again…..mobile/flexible hips,  legs, ankles and shoulders will help get there.

Best advice of all is to practice, practice, practice. Any client that I have ever worked with has always shown improvement when they are persistent and consistent. Work up to 50 walk outs if you can. Just like your squat you can begin with 10 or a number that you can handle. Then add one or two a day. Build up slowly until you are able to do 50. If that is too difficult break your walk outs up into 2 sets of 25. Rest between sets or even better. Do a set of your squats as a rest. Your legs will be working while your shoulders catch a rest. This is the kind of workout that is real time saver too. Make sure you watch for next week’s article on the Burpee part 3. The often done, but not often done well…Push Up!

Best,

Robert