Need to burn more leg fat before summer? Start adding more jump exercises to your workouts. Are you looking for ways to shape your lower body because your program isn’t quite working? Add some excitement and intensity to your leg workouts! If you have been doing your squats, lunges and step-ups, that’s great. Keep doing them. But, you need to mix it up a little with some jump training. Jump training has many benefits which include: burning body fat, strengthening bones and increasing power.

Jump training is high intensity training, placing great stress on the bones, joints and connective tissue. Jump training places you at greater risk of injury than less intense training exercises. Therefore jumping and landing techniques should be mastered. Exercises should be performed on safe surfaces such as rubber mats, sprung floors, grass or sand. Concrete or other similar hard surfaces expose you to injury. And, you should have good core and lower body strength to reduce chances of injury.

So you ask, where do I start? A good place to start is with an exercise you learned in kindergarden: skipping! There are many variations of skipping: two legs, one leg, alternating legs, shuffles, slalom, etc. You can progress to eventually skipping at full speed. Skipping is one of the best exercises for burning calories, burning fat, increasing bone density and improving coordination and balance. Other good jump exercises are jump squats, tuck jumps, side-to-side hops, front-to-back hops, long jumps, bounding, jumping jacks, pogo sticks and pike jumps. Learn proper jumping and landing techniques before progressing to full speed execution of these exercises.