The burpee works pretty much every part of your body, requiring you to engage your arm, leg, core and glutes muscles at various stages in the movement. But can this full-body exercise alone lead to a physical transformation? While traveling pre-lockdown, entrepreneur and influencer Alberto Nodale set himself the challenge of doing 50 burpees every single day, regardless of where he was — and soon found the task more exhausting than he initially thought.
“The burpees here are killing me, the altitude is insane in comparison to where I live,” he says on Day 1 in Mexico. “It’s like doing burpees on a mountain.”
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After stepping on a sea urchin and injuring his foot, Nodale has to take a few days off the challenge, then he triples up on the reps to catch up, doing 153 burpees in a single session.
“I must say, it doesn’t really get easier,” he says. “Every time I hit 30, I’m like holy cow, how am I going to do another 20, especially if I start off too fast… I wonder if it’s going to get easier, and at some point I’ll be like oh, 40, no problem. But at this point I’m completely out of breath every single time I do it.”
He explains that on some days he splits the 50 reps up into sets, doing 5 sets of 10 to make it easier, but adds that he’s trying to get them all out in one go, as that presents more of a challenge. “I’m always doing 50, but sometimes I’m including them into my regular workout,” he says, “so I’ll do 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, right now I’m doing 25, 25. Most of the time, though, 50 in one go doesn’t always work.”
Halfway through the challenge, Nadole begins to notice some visible changes in his pectorals: “I feel like I’m getting a little fuller in the chest, more dense, not really bigger or anything.”
But as the month progresses, the burpees remain as tough as they did at the beginning. “It’s intense, it doesn’t really feel like it’s getting a lot better, every time it’s really exhausting,” he says.
By the time the challenge comes to an end, Nadole’s chest is more defined, but he puts that down to the pump he is getting from doing the reps each day. “It doesn’t look like I suddenly grew a massive chest just because I did a few burpees every single day.”
He has, however, improved in his performance when it comes to cranking out 50 burpees in one go. At the start of the month, it took Nadole 2 minutes 11 seconds to complete all 50 reps, and by the end of the challenge he has shaved more than 30 seconds off his time, finishing the burpees in 1 minute 36 seconds. “What I think made a huge difference was simply the mental aspect of it,” he says.
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