11 Burpee Variations for Next-Level Muscle Conditioning and Strength

The burpee is one of the most complete multifunctional bodyweight exercises you can do. Depending upon the necessities of your training situation, or your fitness level, a batch of burpees can be employed as your dynamic warm-up set, burnout set, or as the entirety of your workout. That’s because performing a basic burpee is a full-body exercise that will challenge your chest, triceps, legs, and abdominals through a simple sequence of bodyweight training movements. It will also cause your heart rate to skyrocket thanks to the simultaneous energy expenditures from those muscle groups.

So, how can you take an exercise that’s already comprehensive and make it even more demanding? There are potentially dozens of ways to accomplish this, and the majority of them stem from inserting little creative tweaks into the regular burpee process that aren’t all that complex.

All of these modifications are in the service of taking a heart-pumping, muscle-conditioning movement and making it even more challenging simply by adding a new wrinkle. While this may sound minor, those inclusions can make a massive difference with respect to the obstacles that each variation of a burpee is preparing you to overcome.

Best Burpee Variations Exercises

• Regular Burpee
• Chest-Pass Burpee
• Squat Burpee
• Mountain Climber Burpee
• Single-Leg Mountain Climber Burpee
• Leapfrog Burpee
• Box Jump Burpee
• Single-Leg Burpee
• Dumbbell Burpee
• Pull-Up Burpee
• Superman Burpee

1. Regular Burpee

The basic burpee was invented by Royal H. Burpee Sr. It was created in the late 1930’s as a fitness assessment for the average person as part of his Ph.D. research in applied physiology at Columbia University, according to Sheryl Burpee Dluginski, Royal H. Burpee’s granddaughter and a personal trainer. 

“He [Royal H.] was the Physical Director at Sloane House YMCA at the time, and was looking for a quick and simple way to test the fitness of new members at the Y so that he could individualize their fitness programming,” says Dluginski, who also operates BurpeeFit.org. “When the US joined WWII in December 1941, the US military adopted and adapted the exercise as a way to quickly assess the overall fitness of new recruits.” 

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In a fitness scenario, the burpee translates into an examination of your muscles’ functionality as they answer the simple question: How many times can you get your entire body on and off of the ground before it gives out? As Royal H. Burpee intended, the number of burpees you could complete in 20 seconds would demonstrate your fitness level and whether or not you were well conditioned.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you in a position slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
5. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position. 

Coach’s Tip: To turn this exercise into a more chest- and triceps-focused movement, insert a push-up between steps three and four.

Sets and Reps: In keeping with the objectives and assessments of the burpee’s creator, try to complete three sets of 20 burpees, and strive to conclude all three sets in 30 seconds or less.

2. Chest-Pass Burpee

You can perform this burpee variation with a training partner, but realistically, it can be completed as a solo exercise if you have a hard surface to throw a ball against directly adjacent to the flat surface you’re going to exercise on.

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This variation takes all of the benefits of a basic burpee and adds some serious urgency to it by requiring you to throw an object against a wall and then get down and up rapidly enough to catch it on the rebound.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your hands holding a medicine ball of some kind, and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Throw the ball outward using both of your hands at chest level, so that it flies straight into a nearby wall
3. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you in a position slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
4. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
5. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
6. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position. 
7. Catch the ball as it rebounds off the wall.

Coach’s Tip: To ensure that this burpee exercise retains its appropriate level of challenge throughout your set, you can back further away from the wall as you progress to compensate for reduced endurance as the sets continue.

Sets and Reps: This chest-pass option requires an added degree of focus and concentration not present in the classic burpee. Three sets of 15 repetitions should be adequate to test yourself, provided that the ball returns to you with accuracy.

3. Squat Burpee

The squat burpee is an abbreviated version of a burpee workout that minimizes rest, and eliminates your ability to move at half speed during its truncated segments. You’ll spend your time vacillating between a prone position on the ground, and a bent-knee squat position in which your feet are flat on the floor, with essentially no intermediary stages.

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When done correctly, this movement will develop some body strength and raw explosiveness in the muscles of your chest, triceps, and shoulders. This occurs when you propel your upper body completely off the ground, leaving just enough space for your feet to slide underneath your torso and into a supportive position.

How to Do it: 

1. Sit in a crouched position, with your waist and knees bent and your feet flat on the floor.
2. Hop and extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters a high plank position while your toes and hands touch the ground simultaneously. 
3. Press your body off the ground and rapidly tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that your hands are not on the ground by the time your feet touch them.

Coach’s Tip: Be very mindful about training to absolute failure during this variation; the fact that neither your hands nor feet are on the ground during segments of this exercise makes it possible to injure yourself if they fail to land in a stable position.

Sets and Reps: This exercise will probably cause you to fatigue very rapidly, and it is important for your feet to get adequate clearance from the ground so they can get safely beneath you. Begin with three sets of 10 reps, and see how you do before adding additional reps. 

4. Mountain Climber Burpee

This burpee variation extends your time on the ground and makes that sequence even more dynamic by requiring you to toss in a short mountain climber sequence. Mountain climbers are a demanding, ground-based bodyweight cardio exercise in and of themselves, and their addition will relieve you of any notions that your time spent with outstretched legs can offer moments for miniature breaks.

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While many people like to touch their toes to the ground during each repetition of a mountain climber, the correct execution of the exercise does not permit the forward-reaching toe to tap the ground. This necessitates the use of speed and precision to motor through this exercise, which uniquely challenges your hip flexors.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you in a position slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Perform a mountain climber motion by sequentially raising each of your knees toward your chest without allowing the raised knee to touch the ground.
5. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
6. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position.

Coach’s Tip: Remember that the toe from your bent leg does not contact the ground during mountain climbers. This means there should be no miniature two-footed hops during the mountain climber segments of these burpees.

Sets and Reps: These burpees have more cardiovascular demand than traditional burpees and require you to complete rapid leg movement on the floor. Three sets of 15 burpees is an excellent starting point.

5. Single-Leg Mountain Climber Burpee

While the regular mountain climber burpee is more of a conditioning additive to a burpee’s basic formula, the single-leg mountain climber option will also enable you to gauge your coordination. This is because it requires you to complete a full-body exercise on a single leg before your return to a standing position.

Like its full-mountain-climber counterpart, this burpee option will additionally challenge your hip flexors. However, the requirement of your foot to touch the ground closer to the level of your groin narrows your body’s base at different points of this exercise. This amplifies the resistance to your core during the floor-based segment of the exercise.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Raise one leg off the ground, then bend the opposite knee to pull the other foot forward toward your head, then backward so that both legs simultaneously return to their plank position.
5. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
6. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position. 
7. Repeat the motion using the opposite leg for the mountain climber segment.

Coach’s Tip: Keep your unused leg slightly bent, elevated, and out of the way so that it doesn’t touch the ground while your active foot is engaging the ground during the mountain climber portion. 

Sets and Reps: To balance out the work of building coordination for each side of your body, endeavor to complete three sets of 16 burpees, with eight mountain-climber segments being devoted to each leg.

6. Leapfrog Burpee

This burpee option has you complete a burpee before launching yourself up and forward through the air prior to starting another burpee after you land. If there’s a burpee combination that you might prefer to do along the length of a running track instead of an isolated space, this is it.

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This version of the burpee places an added emphasis on the muscles responsible for jumping and encourages you to execute a productive leap as opposed to a jump in place where your toes barely leave the ground. This creates opportunities for both movement and excitement.

How to Do it: 

1. Crouch in a bent-knee position with your knees wider than shoulder-width apart, your feet flat on the ground, and your hands flat on the ground between your legs.
2. Leap up and forward from out of the crouched position, landing in a position identical to the one you began in.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, and back into their starting position with your knees wider than your hands.

Coach’s Tip: Adding some forward propulsion to your leapfrog burpees can make them more enjoyable, or they can be performed with stationary leaps or with sideways leaps over the body of a nearby workout partner.

Sets and Reps: The leaping motion of this exercise increases the challenge to the leg muscles and primarily to your glutes, quadriceps, and calves. Begin with three sets of 12 before adding additional reps.

7. Burpee to Box Jump

The burpee into a box jump is another burpee requiring you to conclude the movement with a plyometric jump; you’re going to go through the full burpee movement before launching yourself on top of a plyo box located directly in front of you. 

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This burpee variation requires you to maintain a bare minimum level of lower-body explosiveness throughout a set to clear the height of the plyo box. It is an excellent way to gauge how well your lower body can maintain its propelling force throughout relatively short sets.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
5. Press through your feet, leap off the ground, raise your feet, and land on top of a plyo box (or another suitable object) placed in front of you.
6. Hop backwards to lower your feet back to the ground.

Coach’s Tip: While plyometric boxes provide obstacles, they are not very forgiving if you make errant jumps or have unsure feet. Leaping as high as you can and tucking your knees in (tuck jump) can similarly activate your relevant muscles without requiring you to summit an object.

Sets and Reps: As fun as box jumps are, they can be dangerous if you let your body fatigue to an extent where you can’t confidently clear the top of a plyo box. Three sets of eight burpees is a solid starting point for ensuring your safety and seeing how well your jump height holds up.

8. One-Legged Burpee

Completing a burpee on one leg takes some serious coordination and body awareness. A regular burpee is challenging enough, especially for beginners, but the difficulty is drastically ratcheted up when you can only rely on one leg for support throughout the entire exercise.

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[In fact, the one-legged burpee is difficult simply because of the effort it takes to keep the inactive leg out of the way. This also means that returning to your feet requires the completion of a move that’s equivalent to a single-leg bodyweight squat.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and with one of your knees bent to raise that foot off the ground. 
2. Bend at your knee and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your supporting leg out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, with only one of your toes striking the ground behind you. 
4. Tuck your leg underneath you in one motion, so that only the foot of your active leg touches the ground and your weight rests on the ball of your lone supporting foot.
5. Press through your foot, and straighten your leg and back to return your body to its starting position. 

Coach’s Tip: Keep your unused leg slightly bent, elevated, and out of the way so that it doesn’t touch the ground while your active foot is contacting the ground during the mountain climbers portion.

Sets and Reps: Not only is your stability being tested during this exercise, but each leg has to support twice its weight during every other rep. Three sets of 16 reps should provide you with enough time to determine if each of your legs can hold up under the added demands.

9. Dumbbell Burpee

Adding two dumbbells to the burpee exercise transforms the part of the movement where you lift yourself from the floor into a deadlift, stiff-legged deadlift, or jumping deadlift, depending on how you press your way through it. This practical movement will test your ability to rapidly transition from a prone position into a fully engaged ground-based lift.

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This variation certainly furthers the difficulty during your burpee segment, with how you lift yourself off the ground enhancing the tension placed on the combination of your extensor spinae, hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes, and calves.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down, with each of your hands holding a dumbbell, and with your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, simultaneously placing each dumbbell on the ground in front of you with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
5. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to raise the dumbbells off the ground and to return your body to its starting position. 

Coach’s Tip: To add to the demand on your legs during this exercise, transform the portion where you raise yourself back to a standing position into a deadlift jump by propelling your feet off the ground.

Sets and Reps: A deadlift is challenging enough under nearly all circumstances, but thrusting your legs out, planking, and recovering between each rep adds to your fatigue. Three sets of eight to 10 repetitions should be more than adequate to wipe you out.

10. Pull-Up Burpee

Truly turning the burpee into an all-purpose muscle-conditioning exercise, the pull-up burpee will transform your burpee into a one-stop-shop for upper- and lower-body training. This is especially true if you include some variations of the pull-up in the process. 

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Adding a pull-up to your burpees will place a major emphasis on your lats, rhomboids, and trapezius muscles, adding to the fact that the bulk of your burpee’s other movements are already working your chest, shoulders, quads, abs, glutes, and triceps. 

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you in a position slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
5. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position. 
6. Raise your arms to grasp a pull-up bar above your head.
7. Pull using your muscles in your arms and back to raise your chin slightly above the pull-up bar.
8. Lower yourself back to your starting position and place your feet on the ground.

Coach’s Tip: Inserting a push-up into this exercise will more fully involve the chest, triceps, and shoulders. This inclusion supplies this burpee with stages that directly target every major muscle group in your body.

Sets and Reps: Pull-ups can also be difficult for beginners. Even many well-trained individuals have difficulty executing even 10 in a row, and inserting a full burpee in between the pull-ups won’t necessarily boost your pull-up-specific endurance level. See how well you can perform three sets of five to eight before you begin adding more reps to each set.

11. Superman Burpee

This heroic burpee variation is going to call for you to pull your hamstrings, glutes, erector spinae and posterior delts into an isometric contraction in the middle of the exercise. This means that you’re going to have very brief isometric holds that address both the anterior and posterior portions of your body before you lift yourself back off the floor.

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Also, before you begin to program Superman burpees, you should also understand without question that you’re going to be obligated to perform a push-up with a full range of motion simply to elevate your chest completely off the floor. This means your triceps and pecs are going to perform some serious work before this exercise is over with.

How to Do it: 

1. Stand upright with your arms down and your feet forward and slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. 
2. Bend at your knees and waist to lower your body to the ground, placing your hands on the ground in front of you with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.
3. Extend your legs out behind you in one motion so that your body enters into a high plank position, and your toes touch the ground simultaneously. 
4. Lower your chest completely to the floor.
5. Lift your hands and feet off the ground, and engage the muscles of your back and glutes to raise your arms, legs, and upper chest completely off the floor.
6. Return your hands and feet to the floor, and press with the muscles of your chest and triceps to raise yourself back to a plank position.
7. Tuck your legs underneath you in one motion, so that both feet touch the ground simultaneously, and your weight rests on the balls of your feet.
8. Press through your feet, and straighten your legs and back to return your body to its starting position. 

Coach’s Tip: To increase the demand on your spinal erectors and glutes, you can extend the Superman hold for up to 10 seconds during each burpee.

Sets and Reps: Your ability to execute full push-ups can be a serious limiting factor during this exercise. Begin with three sets of 10 to 15 repetitions, and then add reps from there if your chest and triceps can sustain you throughout all three sets.

Burpee Warm-Up

If you have already advanced to a point in your body conditioning that you consider your burpees to be a workout unto themselves, then have at it. Burpees require collaboration and rapid transitions between different muscle groups, so gently warming up all the involved muscles is a wise move that won’t add too much time to your workout.

• Bodyweight squats: 1 x 20-30 reps 
• Planks: 1 x 30-60 seconds
• Push-ups: 1 x 10-20 reps
• Jumping jacks: 1 x 30-60 seconds

How to Train With Burpee Variations

Any burpee variation should be programmed with a specific performance intent in mind and a recognition of the intrinsic advantages and limitations to simultaneously training different muscle groups. Where advantages are concerned, burpee variations can rapidly boost your heart rate, fatigue your muscles, boost your reflexes, and prepare your muscles to tackle obstacles collaboratively. 

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A limitation imposed by burpee variations is that one movement tends to fail before the others have achieved their limit. In other words, if you’re flying through a set of pull-up burpees, there’s a good chance you’re going to reach your limit on the pull-up stage before your legs have been fully fatigued from the squatting stage. 

Burpee Variation Selection

With so many burpee variations to choose from, you can easily select a version that aligns with your fitness goals. For instance, athletes like volleyball players, soccer goaltenders, or anyone who needs to rapidly recover from a prone position should consider the chest-pass burpee. On the other hand, the Superman burpee presents an option for exercisers searching for an entertaining way to sneak some additional posterior chain activation into their training without engaging with weights or isolation movements.

Burpee Variation Training Tips

The collage of motion that constitutes a burpee affirms that there are several movements that exercisers must perform correctly to complete a burpee or any of its variations. This also means that there is a mountain of potential for burpees to be performed incorrectly or sloppily. That’s why you’ll need to stay vigilant to keep your routine of preferred burpee variations aligned with their intended purpose.

Be Aware of Your Failure Points

Unless the strength and endurance levels of your muscles are perfectly calibrated to one another to a degree that they will all reach their exhaustion point at the exact same moment of your burpee sets, this means some of your body parts are likely to be undertrained. 

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If your goal is to fully exhaust all of your muscles, it might be a sound strategy to isolate the movements where no muscle failure has occurred. For instance, if you can no longer tuck in, but you can still raise yourself off the ground, adding a final set of bodyweight squats at the end might do the trick.

Stay Explosive

One of the unfortunate shortcomings of training plans that advise you to deliver a maximum-intensity effort for extended periods is that they fail to disclose the impossibility of doing such a thing. Most people can usually only maintain an all-out effort for about one minute as your body transitions through energy systems. If such routines extend for long enough, they invariably devolve into steady-state cardio.

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You can extend a burpee set for minutes and potentially hours if you slow your movement down and delay each stage for long enough. If this is your objective, that’s fine, but if you desire to train the explosiveness of your body over duration, you should take a qualitative approach to burpee training. This means to rein your sets into rep totals that allow you to sustain a quick pace throughout the effort.

Be Careful About Adding Equipment

As your body fatigues, it can become increasingly more difficult to control with precision. When your body is the only instrument involved in your training process, this can be dangerous enough if a hand or a foot gets misplaced during a burpee. However, when your body has to interact with heavy objects, it can boost the potential for injury.

This can be as simple as your hand slipping from a pull-up bar or a push-up bar, neglecting to brace your back adequately before you remove a dumbbell from the floor, or failing to clear a hurdle with your feet if you opt to leap off the ground. As your body fatigues, be sure to end your workout if you notice the timing and crispness of your movements begin to falter.

Benefits of Training With Burpee Variations

Burpees are probably not for beginners and are no ordinary method of resistance training. Aside from enabling you to focus on challenging and strengthening several muscle groups, they also offer athletic benefits that traditional, less-dynamic strength-training exercises have difficulty replicating.

A Capable Body

Having a strong body is certainly desirable, but possessing a capable body is something else entirely. Most bodybuilding exercises are of a static, predictable variety, and this is true even when they involve multiple joints.

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Burpee variations enable you to push your body through space and with gravity supplying the resistance in a wide assortment of patterns. This prepares your muscles to perform movements that you might have to perform in an unpredictable real-world setting instead of a comparatively stable gym environment.

A Responsive Body

Part and parcel to having a body that is prepared to interact with the real world is a body that is prepared to respond to unpredictable stimuli. Taking your body through a diverse medley of movements can educate your body to instinctively maneuver in multiple directions from any of the positions that you might find yourself in.

No Weak Spots

Targeting specific muscles with resistance training methods is ordinarily the preferred tactic for isolating and strengthening those muscles to their maximum capacity. That said, if someone prefers an alternative training method that bypasses a major muscle group, enlisting the aid of a solution like a burpee can prevent certain groups from being neglected.

More Training Content

If there’s one lesson you can take from our list of burpee variations, there is virtually no limit to the movements you can string together within the burpee format to support your fitness mission. Burpees can be fun, challenging, and comprehensive. As long as you’re motivated to move, there is a burpee variation that will satisfy your training needs.

For more information on training with burpees and their byproducts, please read these BarBend articles here:

• Everything You Need To Know About Burpees — Technique, Benefits, And More
• Nick Anapolsky Crushes 879 Burpees In One Hour For Guinness World Record
• Tired Of Air Squats, Burpees, And Lunges On Repeat?

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