Monday, June 28, 2010

As the head swells, so it deflates . . .

As I was preparing to come here to post about how proud I was of my performance at boot camp this morning, I found an article written by some fitness guru in which he went off about the fact that he often sees floppy burpees being done incorrectly and/or with poor form. I then realized that my performance would probably cause him to blow a gasket.

HOWEVER, 8 weeks ago I could barely do ONE floppy burpee and I HATED-HATED-HATED them with a passion! Regular burpees were bad enough, but floppy burpees (a burpee w/ added push-up) just seemed like unnecessary torture. Each time the coach would tell us that we had to do them, I would whine like a baby and imagine forcing her head into a toilet.

Amazingly, at some point over the past 8 weeks I learned to keep my mouth shut and surrender to them, for fear that expressing my hatred was resutling in more frequent punishment.

Anyway, one of this morning's boot camp exercises was to start out doing 10 floppy burpees followed by one push-up. Then 9 floppy burpees followed by 2 push-ups . . . working your way down to one floppy burpee and nine push-ups. Get it? Good.

Well, I completed the entire set, folks. Oh yes I did!! Granted, I did modified push-ups for the push-up part, but I do get my chest all the way down to the ground (and I plan to start working on full-body push-ups soon).

For some of you who are more fit - or for those who haven't actually tried floppy-burpees, this might not seem like much. For me, this is HUGE. And I didn't whine OR imagine the coach's head in the toilet! And in fact, when the coach asked if it sucked, I told her it wasn't all that bad! (Though I am now convinced that I was still half-asleep and didn't know what the heck I was saying, as it caught up with me later and I was forced to take a cat-nap on the couch at around 2 pm!)


Below is a link to a quick video of a floppy burpee for you to enjoy. The problem with my form, btw, is that I put my chest and thighs all the way down on the ground before jumping back into the squat position, rather than remaining in the plank position - so some of the benefit to the core is lost (and the lower back might be overly stretched?), but given my core is my weakest area, I'll forgive myself for now. And I'll work on improving my form in the future. :)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5oXadjFAlQ

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