After only being able to do a single one-legged medicine ball burpee last week, I was able to do 12 last night. Here’s the trick:
The X2 Core workout of P90X2 is all about core strength and balance. Having completed P90X twice, I’ve found this workout intimidating but not impossible. The exception is the one-legged medicine ball burpee. The workout calls for a single set of 12, but on the first day I was only able to do 1.
Last night, on the second day of X2 Core I was able to do all 12. It’s not that I got that much better over 7 days. The trick was that I stopped and really watched how the people in the video were doing this exercise. I was doing it wrong. My mistake was that I had the medicine ball at shoulder level when I was doing a one-legged push-up on it. This made it very difficult to balance.
Simply moving the medicine ball ‘down’ to solar-plexus level helped immensely. This way I was more balanced and my arms were perpendicular to the ground, and I was able to keep my elbows in. It was still very difficult, but I was able to hammer out 12 ugly reps. Now that I understand the form I can work on perfecting it and working on 12 slow, solid reps.
So, if you’re doing P90X2 now, and find one-legged med-ball burpees as difficult as I did, have another look at your form and make sure you’re not putting the ball to much in front of you, instead of directly under you.