There are few things that strike fear in the average gym-goer as quickly and deeply as when they look at the day’s workout program and see round after round of the most dreaded exercise in the trainer’s repertoire: burpees.Before your knees start shaking and you think back through possible excuses to skip out on learning more about the burpee, take a moment to read up on the exercise’s origins and the right way to perform the move. Then, you can decide if you want to skip out on your next burpee session. The History of the BurpeeThe movement itself, a brutally efficient bodyweight exercise that demands you to get down on the ground, then back up again as quickly as physically possible, has taken on an outsized reputation as a grueling conditioning tool used in everything from CrossFit WODs to group fitness classes. That’s slightly surprising given its origin—the exercise was named after its creator, physiologist Royal H. Burpee, as a protocol to test fitness and physical capacity. Later on, burpees were used by the US military as a benchmark test for incoming recruits. Now, the burpee has taken on an outsized reputation as one of the toughest moves you can include into your workout, in part because of the devia… Click below to read the full story from Men’s Health
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