How many Burpees do I have to do per day to lose a lot of fat fast?

Question

I hate exercise, I find it excruciatingly boring. But I am overweight and need to lose fat fast. The main reason why I find it boring is because it takes too long and I don't like doing a a variety of exercises. It seems like you have to run on a treadmill for half an hour to lose the calories you get from eating one apple. And following exercise dvds with it's myriad of exercises is just painfully annoying.

I want to get my daily exercise session over with as fast as possible while getting the most out of it. So I am looking to do some intense high straining cardio exercises to the point where my heart is beating really fast and I am burning a lot of calories and fat.

The exercises I found so far that does this for me are:

Burpees
Mountain Climbers
Suicide Sprints

I can't do the latter because I work out in my room and well there is no room for sprints. I like mountain climbers but it doesn't exhaust me as much as Burpees do so I rather just stick to that as it is the most exhausting.

So I just want to do Burpees. How many do I have to do and how many reps of each and how much rest in between reps in order to burn an insane amount of calories (and then fat) per day?

Details:

Age: 23
Sex: male
Weight: 180lbs
Height: 5'8
Body Type: overweight 

Please don't hesitate to recomend something super intense.

Answer 1

One work-out routine for high-intensity is "Tabata", see this search on this site: Search:tabata and this question: What is tabata? How effective is it?

Answering your question, you would do 20 seconds of burpees, rest for 10 seconds and repeat this for e.g. 8 times. That would take you about 4 minutes. The more fit you are, you can add more sets.

However, since you are overweight (BMI ca 27), you should take it easy initially, burpees are very hard if you do them correctly. So:

• Do a medical checkup first since you will have a very high pulse rate doing burpees in a tabata context.
• Do some light warm-up before the burpees, e.g. see this question: Morning stretch
• Work on the technique initially (e.g. don't do a maximum jump or step backwards instead of jumping)

Whether this will help you to loose fat depends also on diet, see this weight-loss tag

Answer 2

The bottom line is that you need to burn Calories, and have a way of measuring the Calories you are burning. If you have a heart rate monitor that is calibrated to where you are right now, you'll have a pretty decent indicator of the progress you are making.

That said, the most amount of Calories I've burned in one session was about 1,400 Calories over 1.5 hours. The activities involved included heavy lifting with compound lifts, and following it with performing my katas for conditioning. This is not something I can do every day, but I can do it about 3-4 times a week.

I can't tell you how many burpees you have to do per day. I can tell you that your heart rate has to be up for an extended period of time to burn a lot of Calories.

In general, a pound of fat is ~3500 Calories. If you do not change what you are eating, and you are burning 1,000 Calories a day through exercise, you can lose a pound every 3-4 days. However, to keep it off, you will have to either adjust what you are eating or keep doing the grueling workout from now till eternity.

Answer 3

If you don't like spending a lot of time doing exercise, bodyweight is the wrong way to go about it. To make gains you need progressive overload, and the only way to get progressive overload with bodyweight exercises is to increase your reps or sets, and that's going to draw your exercise out.

To get things done quickly, you need to lift heavy weights, as you can get progressive overload by increasing the weight you lift while keeping the same number of reps and sets, so you don't end up spending any more time.

If you really want to do burpees you can, but as you start losing weight you're actually doing less work with your burpees so you'll have to do more just to maintain any progress you've made, and further jack it up to continue making inroads.