Jumping jacks is a cardio and fitness exercise that help to tone your whole body while burning fat. Although, this exercise involves arm and feet movement as you do in jumping rope.
Here you will discover everything about jumping jacks, including:
- Their benefits
- How to do jumping jacks
- What muscles do jumping jacks work
- Jumping jacks calories burned
What are jumping jacks?
Jumping jacks are very common exercise that we do in every sports activity to warm up the body. Most athletes don't give much importance to this exercise.
However, jumping jacks are very effective that target your whole body, increases stamina, coordination, improve leg strength and muscles tone. When combined with other exercises it will give you a complete workout.
Mainly involves jumping, moving your feet, and raising your hands above head. The faster you do this movement, the more difficult it gets.
1. Jumping Jacks Benefits
Great Exercise to Warm-up your Whole Body
As jumping jacks works on your whole body, it can be used for warm-up. 5-10 minutes of jumping jacks will allows you to boost blood flow and increase the body temperature, which help improve your performance while working out.
Before any fitness or weight training, warming up are important part of your workout. It make your muscles ready for workout and will help avoid injuries. Therefore, jumping jack is best way to warm up your whole body properly.
Tone your Whole Body and Muscles
Jumping jack is a complete exercise which allow you to increase your cardiovascular function and muscle tone. If your goal is to lose weight; it's great for those who can't do long sessions, also very effective to tone your body.
The movement puts stress on the legs, arms, shoulders and chest. The jumping jacks exercise works on buttocks as well as core muscles. The intense HIIT sessions help you to quickly increase your heart rate and burn calories faster.
However, to work on your abdominal perform with proper form and maintain your balance. It is the exercise that promotes cardiovascular health without taking your much time.
Improves your Stamina and Oxygen Capacity
Jumping jacks great for heart, and lungs which enhance cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Once your endurance increase you will able to perform workout for long duration with more repetitions. The better you perform during workout the faster you will achieve fitness goal.
Great for Weight Loss
To maintain or lose weight with jumping jacks, you can do them with your circuit training with other exercises or do them alone. For better result you can do them 10-20 minutes while keeping your rest duration short.
However, if you are advanced then you can do them with backpack, this would be much tougher than basic jumping jacks.
For beginners, you can reduce your duration for example; 5 minutes with 60 seconds of rest, you can do 3 sessions of 5 minutes.
It does not Take Much Time
Jumping jacks can be done by everyone such as beginner to advance. You can do them for various purpose; to lose weight, and to tone muscles. Although, you don't need any equipment to practice regular.
10-20 minutes are enough to get those benefits and improve your health. However, if you want to lose weight faster then, you should do them with maximum intensity and, it would be much better if you do them at early morning in fasted state.
Other Jumping Jack Benefits
- Improves your jumping and running
- Help to maintain your body shape
- Fight against cellulite
- Improves blood circulation
- Burn many calories in a short period of time
- Improve balance and agility
- Strengthen your upper back and shoulder muscles
2. What Muscles do Jumping Jacks Work
- Quadriceps muscle or legs: The leg muscles are the main muscles used such as calves and buttocks. Quadriceps, consist of 4 separate muscles, which is responsible for knee extension. Even if you keep your legs straight, still it bends slightly during the movement, which puts stress on quadriceps.
- Core and Abs: when you do jumping jacks, it is important to contract core muscles, maintain good posture and perform with good form.
- Arms muscles: as your hands constantly moving, the biceps muscle also work in this exercise. The deltoid is the bigger muscle of the shoulder. It contracts especially when the arms are raised and lowered, by moving your arms, it will also tone the shoulder muscles.
- Calf muscle: the calf muscles uses when you jump and return to starting position.
- Hip abductor muscles: when you spread and returns your legs back to normal position it activates hip abductor muscles.
- Gluteus maximus muscle: when jumping with the legs spread apart, the gluteus maximus muscle uses.
3. Jumping Jacks Calories Burned
However, calories burn rate are differ from person to person, because it depends on your age, height, gender, weight, speed of your jump and if you perform them with proper form or not.
If your weight is 68-70 kg then you will burn almost 268 calories within 30 minutes. If you complete 100 jumping jacks in 2 minutes then it will consume almost 19 calories. (source)
But, if you want to save your time and wants to burn more calorie at short duration with this exercise then intensity play important role. Jumping jacks is ideal for HIIT training, which burn enough calories in short time.
4. How to do Jumping Jacks
- Get into the position by standing hip-width apart. Place your arms at the sides.
- Engage your core, keep your neck straight and chest out.
- Jump as long as you can while spreading legs.
- As you jump raise your arms up until it goes above your head.
- Land while maintaining your posture and form with your legs spread apart.
- Then, return to starting position and repeat as long as you can.
- Don't forget to maintain your arms and legs movement as you jump and returned to starting position.
During the whole movement, keep your body position and form upright. To get most of the benefits and prevent injuries right form is necessary. If you are feeling exhausted or doing out of form then take few seconds of break. And make sure keep your legs position with proper distance.
5. How Long Does it takes to Show Results with Jumping Jacks
Every exercise has different calories burn rate and it also depends on your goals, diet, how much calories you burn per day and the training frequency.
Doing them with other exercises will allow you to get faster improvement in your whole body. Diet also important part of training program to burn calories, build muscles and lose weight. They are important factor that will help achieve your goals faster.
However, try to exercise at least five times a week and you will notice amazing improvements in your body after 30 days. It will help tone your muscles so you will look sharp, your waist and thigh will become slimmer and attractive and many more benefits you will get with jumping jacks.
Related: 30 Days Jumping Jacks Challenge
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