Jumping Jacks: How Efficient Is This Technique?

If you love sport and workout every day, then you should’ve realized that you do jumping jacks before you start your fitness activity to warm up a bit. They’re also used for cardiovascular training in case you’re doing them for at least 15 minutes without you stopping. They’re an easy exercise, but you should know that you need some coordination in order to do them properly.

How to prepare for a jumping jack exercise

If you chose to go for jumping jacks for your cardiovascular training, you need to stretch a bit before beginning your workout. Do some stretching to your arms, legs and lower back – that for several minutes – and after this, gently shake your arms and legs to finish the stretching. Remember that your workout shoes should be tied properly and tightly because you don’t want to stop in the middle of the workout to adjust them or tie them again.
Jumping jacks is a very easy exercise, and you can do it at home. However, you might get bored while doing it. To do something while the time passes, you will want to turn on the tv. You can do that, but don’t forget to wear a watch to carefully time your training. If you don’t own one, use any working clock you find in your house – even a clock wall or a morning clock will do.

How to perform a jumping jack exercise
In order to do this exercise, you need to stand up straight, your feet shoulder-width should be apart and your arms should be hanging down by your sides. Jump up and spread your legs, while you raise your arms high, over your head, until they touch. Your hands should be kept open, with the palms which are facing away from you while you’re doing the first part of the exercise.

Now, you should bring your feet back to the shoulder width and, at the same time, you should lower your arms back where they were – down to your sides. Now you’re done with the first jumping jack repetition.

Now you need to keep doing the exercise for as long as you want to do a better cardiovascular fitness workout. At some point, you might feel some pain in your shoulders. In these cases, there are two things you can try: you either slow down the rhythm you went for from the start with the jumping jacks, or you don’t raise your arms as high as you did until now – meaning your hands will not touch up above your head.

How to increase the intensity of a jumping jack exercise

We found out that there’s more than one way to increase the intensity of your jumping jack workout. Next time you want to work out, wear wrist or ankle weights – if you wear them throughout the entire workout, it will get harder to perform the jumping jacks at the same speed you did before (or even at the start of this workout) so you should be careful not to get tired or even hurt yourself.

You can also try to increase the time you work out, just by adding difficulty to it. For instance, if you’re used with 15 straight minutes of jumping jacks, try to perform them for 20 minutes. 10 straight jumping jacks, 2 minutes apart, to rest, and then another round of 10 minutes.

You can also make things difficult by increasing the speed at which you perform them. However, you need to make sure that you’ll still use the proper form when you decide to speed up the rate of the exercise in your workout.

After you’re able to perform this exercise faster in the same amount of time in which you usually train, you can increase the intensity by adding weights to your hands and ankles, or by adding more minutes to your sessions.