Boot camp workouts offer intense physical training, typically combining vigorous cardiovascular exercise with weights or resistance work that improves endurance, strength and flexibility. You may do a boot camp workout to step up your fitness level, train for an athletic event or burn calories at a high enough rate to lose weight.
Types
While boot camp workouts may have started as private classes led by fitness experts and personal trainers, these days you can choose from many types of boot camp workouts. Video series offer you workouts you can do at home. Local gyms and health clubs have boot camp workout sessions as part of their daily schedules. Health experts and trainers have also written books and articles outlining boot camp routines you can follow to lose weight.
Function
In his article "Marching, but to Different Beats," fitness reporter and boot camp practitioner Raul A. Reyes describes a boot camp workout as offering a more efficient exercise routine, one that targets major muscle groups while also raising the heart rate. The boot camp regime resembles many circuit training and interval workouts that have people shifting from one type of exercise to the next in rapid succession.
Features
Reyes mentions some of the typical moves he undertakes in a gym-based boot camp workout. He does intense cardiovascular exercise, such as running around a track or riding at a high speed on a stationary bicycle. In between cardio sessions, he does calisthenics and floor exercises that alternately target upper body, core muscles and lower body muscle groups, such as pull-ups, abdominal crunches, and a series of lunges and squats. He may also do short sessions of weight lifting or body sculpting using hand weights.
Expert Insight
Bob Greene, the personal trainer who developed Oprah Winfrey's boot camp workout program, describes its essential elements. Five days per week, you spend 30 minutes doing vigorous cardiovascular exercise such as speed walking, stair-climbing or jogging. On the sixth day, you double your cardiovascular workout time. In addition, you do strengthening work with resistance bands, hand weights or floor exercises six days per week, for 20 minutes. Two days per week, do an intense half-hour session of circuit training and calisthenics, switching from cardiovascular work to lunges, push-ups, squats and pull-ups.
Prevention/Solution
After you hit a new level of fitness, it can be tempting to plateau with a boot camp workout. Rather than rest on your laurels, step up the challenges to make sure you continue to burn calories at a high rate so you can meet your weight loss goal. You might work out at an incline, extend your cardiovascular workout sessions or pump light hand weights during your cardiovascular exercises.
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