Creating a Killer Cardio Workout

Rebounding fitness emerged in the early 80s and reportedly died down a few years later due to the low quality spring rebounders limiting the workout experience. Then, about 10 years ago Bellicon and JumpSport came onto the market with bungee rebounders and allowed the fitness world to reconnect to this fun form of exercise! Over the past few years (bungee) rebounding has really picked up speed and people are getting to enjoy a ton of benefits from this cool yet challenging form of exercise!

It's important to know though, that the biomechanics of movement plays out differently on a trampoline. Our freehouse classes carefully take this into account in how we created our rebounding workouts. Here are a few highlights:

How we jump...

Shoes off. The human foot contains 26 bones, 20 actively articulating joints, and more than a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments. We want to maintain movement in strength in our feet and the unstable surface of rebounding allows us to do that! Shoes are great to wear when we need protection from hard surfaces. But on a rebounder, the shoe is an unnecessary and rigid cast that locks up our foot, blocking the foot/ankle benefits and sending greater instability forces up the leg into the knee and hip in a not-ideal way. So we jump with naked feet!

Skip the bar. Some rebounders have bars and that can provide helpful assistance to people with balance concerns. But beyond balance problems, the bar gets in the way (i.e. careful not to kick the bar!) and holding onto the bar interferes with the natural jumping movement and diminishes the work of your muscles and benefits of the workout. So we said no thanks to the bars!

Work the muscles. It's fun to jump high and light on a rebounder, or use it for cute dance choreography. But our ultimate goal is to give you a challenging and super-beneficial workout experience (albeit a fun one)! So we consciously pick movements that maximize your muscle work while jumping. This way your classes are not just cardio, but also muscle strengthening. By the time class is done, you'll have flexed every muscle in a concentrated way.

Build the combos. Every freehouse rebounding class starts with doing several sets of each move so  there's practice time to build coordination. But as the minutes pass and the muscles adapt, we cut it down and build combos with only 2-4 reps of each move. This is understandably more challenging! But it's sooooo beneficial. The transitions in between each exercise become new movements and skyrocket the benefits of the workout in terms of muscle work, control, mind-body coordination and more!

​Create & cue. Variety is a super, super, super valuable part of working out. Learning new movement patters has big benefits both physically and mentally so our team kills it every week creating new choreography and combos for our clients. That means you're learning from scratch every week! But we've got you! Our teachers are really skilled at cuing instructions in advance at just the right time to lead you from move-to-more so you don't feel left behind and you become more coordinated with every class!


Our freehouse rebounding classes have become Philly-famous for a reason ;) We've taught almost 3,000 of them since opening, refining the details to give you an amazing workout like no other. Whether you've jumped with us since we opened or are about to try your first class, we are 100% by your side and committed to giving you an awesome experience!