Date: 2024-06-04
AO: thegeneral
Q: Gherkin
PAX: citrus, Apples, Hard Knox, Hobbyhorse, Lazlo, Toolbox, Strange Brew, bogey FNGs: None
COUNT: 9
WARM UP
SSH, Imperial Walkers, Little Bitty Arm Circles, Willie Mays Hays, Cherry Pickers, worlds greatest stretch
THE THANG
Burp & Merk (19 Burpees w/ 100 push ups)
Perform a burpee with a single merkin. Next complete a second burpee with two merkins. Pyramid up to 10 merkins and back down.
Dora
• Partner up
• 1 PAX traverses across field and back while other exercises. • Continue until the team performs 127 of each exercise.
Exercise 1 – Basic Burpee (no merkin or jumping)
Deconstructed Burpee
Exercise 2 – 127 squat thrusts
Exercise 3 – 127 Merkins
Exercise 4 – 127 Squat Leeps
Exercise 5 – 127 Burpees
MARY
See above
ANNOUNCEMENTS
• Dad’s Camp this weekend.
COT
• Happy Birthday to Royal Huddleson Burpee Sr., born June 4, 1897 (octuple respect) and died January 13, 1987 at age 89. A long life no doubt due at least partly to his dedication to fitness.
• Mr. Burpee designed the Burpee in 1939 as part of his doctoral thesis in Applied Physiology at Columbia University. (Burpee is actually the Americanized spelling of the French Canadian Beaupre’.) Born and raised in Little Neck, on the edge of Queens, after serving in the Navy in World War I, Burpee began a distinguished career as a director at the New York YMCA. He dedicated his life to promoting physical fitness and well-being through science and higher learning.
• Based on a black and white family photo (posted below), Doc Burpee practiced what he preached. “He was an athletic guy his whole life, participating in gymnastics, wrestling, and weightlifting. He was also an intelligent, demanding perfectionist. A career in applied physiology probably appealed to the athlete and the scientist in him,” said Royal’s granddaughter Sheryl Burpee Dluginski, herself a longtime gymnastics coach and fitness trainer in New York City.
• As the director of a Y, every day Burpee saw firsthand the need for a quick and accurate way to assess the fitness levels of new members in order to place them in the most beneficial training program. Solving that problem became his obsession and the focus of his doctoral thesis at Columbia.
• He created the “burpee” exercise as part of his PhD thesis as a quick and simple fitness test, which was to be used as a measure of agility and coordination. The original burpee was a “four-count burpee” and in the fitness test, the burpee was performed four times, with five heart rate measurements taken before and after the four successive burpees to measure the efficiency of the heart at pumping blood and how quickly the heart rate returns to normal.
• The exercise was popularized when the United States Army made it one of the ways used to assess the fitness level of recruits when the US entered World War II. Although the original test was not designed to be performed at high volume, the Army used the burpee to test how many times it can be performed by a soldier in 20 seconds – 8 burpees in 20 seconds was considered poor, 10 was fair, 13 or more was excellent. The Army also considered that a soldier fit enough for the rigor of war should be able to perform 40 or 50 burpees non-stop in an easy rhythm.
• In his published thesis, Burpee created roughly 300 measures of fitness, listed alphabetically from Age to Wrestling, his granddaughter says. He also pioneered the notion of fitness that could be catered to a person’s skill and ability, which paved the way for the discipline of personal training. He wrote, “Since interest is sustained not by repeated failure at unsuitable tasks, but by reasonable success following conscientious effort, it is obvious that physical education programs should be adapted to individual ability.” Or in F3 parlance, “Modify as necessary.”
Tags: thegeneral, citrus, Apples, Hard Knox, Hobbyhorse, Lazlo, Toolbox, Strange Brew, bogey

