We Need to Talk About Burpees
Blurry burpee in 2011.
Let’s talk about burpees.
Any reasonably fit person can do one burpee. And probably two. At that point, most reasonably fit (and sane) people would question why they were doing it.
Three burpees starts to get annoying, and if you make it to five you’ll be breathing hard, possibly sweating, and definitely feeling it. And that’s about twenty seconds of work.
If you want to make a workout harder, throw in three burpees every round. If you’re feeling masochistic, make it ten.
So, what is a burpee, and where did it come from?
We can point the finger at US physiologist Royal Huddleston Burpee, Sr. That’s one heckuva name. He created it in 1939 as a way to quickly assess fitness for his PhD thesis.
His original burpee involved 4 steps (from Wikipedia):
Move into a squat position with your hands on the ground.
Kick your feet back into an extended plank position, while keeping your arms extended.
Immediately return your feet into squat position.
Stand up from the squat position.
These days, some people add in a pushup at the bottom and a jump at the top. That’s the burpee I learned. I’ve developed a hate-love-hate-tolerate-love relationship with it over the years. When I was introduced to the move about ten years ago, I was suspicious. And immediately despised them after the workout.
Then I did more of them, and they started to grow on me. I’d do a set of ten to warm up before ultimate games. I’d talk about how many I could do. It became a known evil, and I knew I could at least get through them if they were in a workout.
Then we did a workout where we had to do a ton of burpees, and it took me so long I again decided I didn’t like them. Then came “Beer and Burpees” and they became fun.
Yes, “Beer and Burpees” is a thing. You do 100 burpees, then chug a beer. Then 75, beer. 50 - beer. And finally 25 and a beer. (To be fair, we always skip the round of 100). We do it every March around St. Patrick’s Day and raise a little money for a charity. The person with the best time* gets to pick the charity. And I was that person in 2018.
It made me realize that I can do 150 burpees in a reasonable amount of time (under twelve minutes) and not feel terrible after. And that helps me realize I can do a lot of things that aren’t nearly as hard.
In 2020, I started a live-stream Monday workout, and the impetus for that was a workout called “Death by Burpees”. You start with 1 burpee, and every minute you add another. So, minute one you do one burpee then twiddle your thumbs. But by minute ten you’re doing ten burpees (and you’ve already done minutes one through nine) and there is a lot of gasping but no more twiddling. I thought people would enjoy watching me do that and I was right, and then it turned into a weekly thing that other people joined me on. All because I thought doing something called “Death by Burpees” would be fun.
(For the record, I wanted to get through minute fifteen. I made it through fourteen.)
* “best time” after RJ. He finishes minutes before anyone else so the rest of us battle for second place.
