What is a Bungee Workout?

Are you hankering for a new fitness challenge and looking to keep the ennui out of your exercise routine?

How about something that puts a bit more bounce in your workout step? Or a lot of bounce? Welcome to the up-and-down world of bungee training, a highly flexible workout for very different reasons.

What is a bungee workout?

A bungee workout, like Tabata training, is designed to burn loads of calories. Bungee training intends to provide you with a high-intensity full body workout while you float weightlessly.

Suspended on a bungee cord workout which is attached to your hips, you get to train in exercises that will engage every muscle in your body. It’s meant to build your strength, core stability, your flexibility while you jump and float around the room.

Strap yourself in

For a start, you’ll wear a hip harness. That’s a harness around your hips, not a trendy one and, let’s be honest, it’s no fashion statement. This harness wraps through your legs and around the waist. It’s then clipped to a bungee cord attached to the ceiling. Much like leaping off a bridge, the bungee cord varies according to height, weight and, in this case, strength.

Go for a spin

This is the basic principle of the training. A bungee workout allows you to spin, roll, twist, turn and leap your way through a high-intensity workout like never before. Imagine doing one-handed vertical push-ups. Imagine doing squats where going down is way harder than going up. Imagine simply flying through the air in the interest of getting fit.

It’s acrobatic, exciting and an intense cardio and strength workout for your core, shoulders, triceps, and legs.

Looking to add a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) program to your usual routine? Your search ends here with Tabata! Read our previous blog post and find out if Tabata is for you!

The history of bungee jumping: When was bungee jumping invented? 

Well, that depends on whether you’re talking modern bungee or the less commercial version practiced off a crudely built wooden tower on Pentecost Island in the South Pacific.

From all accounts – or a few anyway - the latter is a tradition based on the legend of local native Tamalie, or rather his abused wife who climbed a tall tree to get away from him. He came up the tree after her, whereby she surreptitiously attached vines to her ankles and jumped. Tamalie jumped after her sans vine and quickly wished he hadn’t. While his wife’s fall was stopped by the vines, his was stopped by the ground and he’s been dead ever since.

As the legend goes, the men of Pentecost Island erected the high tower and have been jumping off it attached to vines to show their women they won’t be tricked again.

As for the creation of modern, commercial bungee, we need look no further than across the Tasman Sea. New Zealand adventurer AJ Hackett set up the world’s first commercial bungee operation high on the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge. 

Is bungee training a fad?

You’d be right to think so. It’s certainly got that new fitness craze, viral fad feel about it. But much like a lot of more proper medical viruses, this one isn’t going away. Supporters love the completely new dynamic bungee brings to what they considered to be a mundane workout.

Bungee brings a whole new sense of fun to training and even seems to be fairly safe.

Looking to improve your health and fitness knowledge? Check out our SIS30315 Certificate III in Fitness – Group Exercise Instructor or some of our other fitness courses. Enquire now and speak to one of our Careers Advisors for more information.