Where Do Burpees Come From? (Spoiler Alert: Not Hell)

Where Do Burpees Come From? (Spoiler Alert: Not Hell)

 Ever do a burpee? Or 30? Ever tackled a circuit that requires, say, five rounds of 15 burpees? If so, you might want someone to blame for bringing this uniquely punishing movement into the world and to the attention of coaches, trainers, and fitness enthusiasts. So at whom can we shake our sweaty, exhausted fists?

It’s difficult to know exactly who’s responsible for today’s burpee, which is often programmed to be done in multiple hi-rep sets (though it's fun to picture an old timey villain twisting his mustache and laughing uproariously as legions of exhausted exercisers drag themselves through each rep). We can, however, identify the one person who is most certainly not to blame for the movement as we know it today: the exercise’s inventor and namesake, Royal Huddleston Burpee.

THANKS, ROYAL H. BURPEE

Royal H. Burpee was a physiologist in New York City who invented a much milder (and less tormenting) version of the movement, intending it to be done just four times in a row as part of a fitness test. In fact, he even spoke out against his movement being done in high volumes. Although there are only two remaining copies of Burpee’s thesis, we were able to get the low down on the origins on the burpee from the granddaughter of Burpee himself—Sheryl Burpee Dluginski.

Burpee Dluginski explained that her grandfather was a “fitness fanatic before Jack Lalanne” himself. At a time when exercise science was mostly concerned with measuring the fitness of already fit people, Burpee wanted a simple way to assess the fitness of everyday folks (starting with the new members of the YMCA in the Bronx, where Burpee worked). So in 1939, when her grandfather was a Ph.D. candidate in applied physiology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, he invented an as-yet-unnamed four-count movement that would provide a quick and accurate way to evaluate fitness. Only later would it evolve into the six-count beast we know today.

Burpee Dluginski says that the movement her grandfather invented has been known as a squat thrust, a four-count burpee, a front-leaning rest, and a military burpee over time. The original exercise was simple:

1. Squat down and place both hands on the floor in front of you.
2. Jump feet back into plank position
3. Jump feet forward.
4. Return to standing.

To administer the fitness test, Burpee Dluginksi says that her grandfather took five different heart rate measurements before and after four burpees were performed and came up with an equation that accurately assessed the heart’s efficiency at pumping blood—a good measure of overall fitness.

FROM FITNESS TEST TO FITNESS PUNISHMENT

Nowadays we know the burpee as a six-count bodyweight movement—that is, a single exercise that requires the athlete to move through six different positions as quickly as possible. Though movement standards vary from gym-to-gym and trainer-to-trainer, the burpee most of us know and love (to hate) is most commonly performed like this:

1. Bend over or squat down and place both hands on the floor in front of you, just outside of your feet.
2. Jump both feet back into plank position.
3. Drop to a push-up—your chest should touch the floor.
4. Push or snake up to return to plank position.
5. Jump feet back in toward hands.
6. Explosively jump up into the air, reaching arms straight overhead.

When you consider that burpees are often done in high-rep sets (say, seven minutes of burpees or a 100-burpee workout), you can imagine how quickly the misery accumulates. After all, a single burpee demands that your entire body work to perform six bodyweight movements in a row (including three separate jumps) that take you from vertical to horizontal, back to vertical again. The fact that the burpee is used as a punishment—as in Spartan Races which require participants to do 30 in a row if they fail to take on or best an obstacle, or at CrossFit gyms that assess a burpee penalty for arriving late to class—tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this killer movement as we now know it. Three separate jumps and a push-up (or some variation of it): It puts the hurt on you, and it does it good and fast