
They are great for your cardiovascular health and getting your heart rate up to burn calories. Why Everyone Should Be Doing Burpees - Benefits of Burpeesīurpees have some amazing benefits. However, later we’ll go over how many trainers have modified these to make them easier for beginners or more challenging for more advanced fitness levels. These basic steps are the foundations for all burpees.

Drive your feet backward until you are in a plank position, spine neutral and core engaged.Move backward and downwards into a squat position and root your hands to the floor in front of you, arms straight.Begin standing, feet shoulder-width apart.It’s important to have a basic understanding of the movement before diving into all of the fancy variations.

So let’s strip it down and go over the basic burpee steps. So, even with all of these variations, there is a consistent basis for this exercise. It’s adaptable to many skill levels, proving that Royal Burpee’s theory of individualized training rings true to this day. Variations are everywhere and they can be modified for beginners or amped up for experts. Over the years, the burpee has evolved and grown. The intense exercise was the perfect way to divide those with the physical abilities for battle and those that were more suited for behind-the-scenes roles. Recruits were to complete as many as possible in a timeframe to see if they made the cut. This is when the exercise got bumped up a notch and the jump and push up were added. So how was America’s Armed Services supposed to ensure that they were sending the best and strongest soldiers into battle? The burpee of course!

Just a few years later, the US found itself being pulled into the conflict of World War II. All of this data was compiled into his doctoral thesis.Īnd Royal’s timing was pretty spot on. Combining it with tracking heart rate changes, Burpee was able to fully assess the fitness level’s of his study participants. It was slightly easier in its original form, sans the push-up and jump. So, the physiology student came up with the exercise we all know to this day. This would allow a customized approach to fitness, scaling it to each person’s unique skill level. He wanted a simple and standardized way to assess fitness levels across the board. The young Royal Burpee (yes, that’s why they are called burpees) was on a mission to accurately measure physical fitness. They were dreamed up in the 30s by a Columbia University grad student as part of his doctoral research. And they weren’t the brainchild of some iron-pumping personal trainer. Shockingly, burpees weren’t born in a gym, but at one of the country’s premier colleges. So what makes burpees so great anyway? And how can you add them to your routine? Here, we’ll go over everything you need to know to use burpees as a tool to smash your fitness goals. Now, it’s a popular part of a ton of HIIT and circuit training routines.

Over time, modifications have been made and variations have been dreamed up all over the world. This dynamic exercise has an interesting and unexpected history. But either way you see them, burpees are a killer, full-body workout.
