Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life by Joe De Sena

Author:Joe De Sena [De Sena, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Spartans need to be flexible. One of the biggest problems many people face today is a lack of flexibility. One result has been an avalanche of back problems, among other things. Ignoring flexibility ties back in to instant gratification—people want beach muscles fast regardless of their long-term health and well-being. So many guys will say, “Oh, yoga, that’s boring” or “That’s for girls.” That’s nonsense and a prescription for a bad back and other injuries. Something one of my uncles said to me once sticks in my mind to this day: “It’s one thing to be strong, but if you’re flexible and strong, then you’re really strong.”

The list of fitness attributes above is a tall order, but I’ve found one exercise that puts it all together: the burpee, aka the squat thrust. Beginning from a standing position, drop into a squat until your hands are actually touching the ground. Without hesitation, kick your legs back to assume the up position of the pushup; do a pushup; and again without hesitation, draw your legs back into lower squat position before standing back up to starting position. From there, drop into another rep.

Think about how many great fitness elements that exercise rolls into one. The squat alone is arguably the single best exercise known to mankind, working your entire body in a way that unleashes a cascade of natural growth hormone and other growth factors. As soon as you kick your feet back, you’re in a plank, arguably the single best position for developing core strength. You also enhance cardiovascular conditioning because of the rapid-fire nature of the move when done for reps.

I think burpees are the ultimate exercise for all those reasons. In fact, if you never want to get sick again in your life, do thirty burpees a day. This works, assuming you eat healthier as well. I’m convinced that disease comes from stagnation within the body. That’s why I love burpees so much, because they feel like they’re lubricating all of your joints and oxygenating all of your tissues. It’s a different sensation than what’s produced by bench pressing or going on a rough run.

I remember when 60 Minutes interviewed Andy and me, and they told us they were convinced that we were on to something with our emphasis on the burpee. They had first encountered it when interviewing a guy on death row who was nicknamed Big Evil. In solitary confinement Big Evil would knock out one thousand burpees a day, and the guy looked, they said, like 270 pounds of shredded steel.

As you’ve already read, when Spartan racers fail to complete an obstacle, they are forced to do thirty burpees. We chose burpees because it’s a tough exercise that only gets harder as the race goes on; and we chose thirty reps because we determined, through trial and error, that that’s the number of penalty reps that would really make you want to conquer that obstacle. If it were five burpees, people might just skip the obstacle and do the penalty reps.

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