Burpees for the New Century

To do a burpee, you drop to a squat, shoot your legs back so you're in a push-up position, do a push-up, shoot your legs back up by your hands so you're in the squat again, then jump in the air. And repeat. Tonight's burpees added a pull-up at the end of each rep: when you jumped, you had to jump for the bar and do a pull-up. The workout was: 25 kettlebell swings to straight overhead ("American-style" kettlebell swings) 15 burpee plus pull-up Four rounds. I kept up with the guys pretty well and finished in 15:42. Doing all those pull-ups one at a time was awesome. Given all the work we did besides pull-ups, I would not have been able to do 15 pull-ups in a row if they were grouped together. But since they were mixed into the burpees, I kind of chugged along. I did not manage to jump straight from the squat to the pull-up. Instead I popped out of the burpee with a slight jump to standing, then jumped to the bar. I felt like my arms were going to fall off. Last night I went for the gymnastics section of the class and we tried some "roll-to-supports" on the rings, using the harness and/or spotting. It was fun but I wasn't very tired out from it afterward, so I did something that several other people had been doing, which was 50 slam-ball for time. It's a basketball stuffed with sand and it weighs about 23 pounds, Scott told me. The idea is to raise it high overhead, slam it to the ground while picking up the feet and dropping to a squat, scooping up the ball from its very slight bounce, and raising it all the way overhead again, 50 times. By 25 I was sorry I'd begun and was kind of lightheaded when I finished, just under two minutes at 1:55. Tom did it in 1:29.