Burpee Blast

Tuesday night I did 60 burpees. If you know what a burpee is, you probably think I'm an idiot. If you don't know what a burpee is, you still probably think I'm not that bright, but for totally different reasons. Anyway, for the uninformed, here's a gif (pronounced gah-if, and not like the peanut butter) I found.

AKA, how to swim on cement

According to Wikipedia, which is always right [citation needed], the burpee was developed by Dr. Royal H. Burpee in the 1930's as part of his PhD studies (who says nothing good ever comes out of the academy?). The exercise was used by the US Armed Services to assess the fitness of recruits heading into WWII. It's useful because it works the entire body in just a few movements. If you can do a bunch of these, you can storm the beaches of Normandy, punch Hitler in the face, and still have time for a short nap.

Do you even burpee, bro?

The burpee is such an important exercise that BJ Gaddour devotes an entire chapter in his book Your Body is Your Barbell to it. Gaddour says that even if he only had a 6x6 space, he could still stay in fighting shape with nothing but burpees.

To be fair, I didn't do the jump at the end because I like my knees too much. Also, I didn't do 60 in one set, nor did I intend to do 60 when I started. My goal was to do 50 in five sets, with two minute breaks. After a brief stretching routine, I did 10 at a moderate pace to warm up. That went pretty well, so I did 15 a little faster. Now I was starting to feel it. I decided to do two more sets of 10, one of five, and call it a night. That's when things started to get interesting.

And by interesting, I mean exhausting

Those final five actually went pretty well, so I decided to go for failure. After each successive pushup I grumbled a little more. As cool as it was that I could keep going, I really wanted to stop. By the time I hit 60, I decided that that was enough. My arms felt like jelly (still do, actually) and I was afraid that my pre-workout snack was going to make a sudden and unpleasant reappearance on the garage floor. So I did some stretches, got a shower, and ate almost an entire large pizza.

Apparently I didn't stretch enough, because two days later my triceps are still tighter than piano strings. Even getting a coffee cup up to my mouth is difficult. But otherwise, I'm sore all over in a good way. Until I get a designated exercise space, I think the burpee will be my go-to workout.

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