The benefits of compound body weight training

I’m sure most of you all are familiar with the burpee. This is what I like to refer to as a compound body weight exercise.  People worldwide use burpees every day and with good reason. It’s simple and extremely beneficial exercise. A compound exercises is made up of 2 or more movements together. The burpee combines a squat, sprawl and a push up. So you are working several major muscle groups at once making it a metabolic exercise. Compound exercises raise your heart rate more so than muscle isolation exercises.

Since the burpee is such an awesome exercise, it made sense to me to develop more compound body weight and kettlebell exercises.  In the new kettlejitsu revolution dvd, I use many different body-weight flows and combinations. Some of these flows even contain movements from jiu jitsu and mma. I specifically created these combos to challenge you both physically and mentally. A good example of what I am talking about is the karate kid flow.  This compound movement consists of a sit up, shin box, deck squat and push up. Using these exercises in unison has many benefits. It challenges your focus, timing, coordination and your conditioning.

This particular exercise was inspired by my trip to Lisbon, Portugal.  There I administered a kettle-jitsu workshop. One of the attendees was a karate kumite fighter named hugo. I was showing different sit up combos and he stopped and asked if was it OK if he added a kick to it. I said show me. I immediately loved it and added it to my arsenal! When I got back home I played with it and added the other movements.  It spawned the “karate kid flow!” We use it regularly at my gym socal mma and fitness to my students enjoyment. Check out the enclosed video for a demo of this amazing compound body-weight exercise. Enjoy!