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by rkalla 5221 days ago
If you are an xfit'er you have probably done the "death by" burpees? "death by" anything is horrible, but burpee's are particularly horrible.

Min 1: 1 burpee... yep, then stand around for 54 seconds. Min 2: 2 burpees. ... Min 14: 14 burpees, you probably only have 8 seconds of rest. Min 17: 17 burpees, no time to rest, keep going! Min 18: 18 burpees, but you never rested after the previous 17 so you just keep going!

And so on and so on. You can do it with pushups, squats, etc. It is a great and super-painful way to break a plateau.

Used to do something similar in weightlifting if we got stuck too long at a certain max of some kind. You start at the lightest weight possible and do 10 reps and move up 5 or 10 lbs each set with no rest between them.

You lift each set to failure (easier on a machine so you aren't dropping weight on your chest or head) and as soon as you fail (no more than 10 reps) you or your partner adds the weight for the next set.

When you can't even do a single rep then you stop and start taking weight off and coming back down to 0 again (or wherever you stared, e.g. just the 45lbs bench bar or something).

You'll want to throw up, but it breaks your muscle down so completely it'll scoot past those barriers.