Spartan Burpee Challenge: A Pre-Test

Our Spartan Burpee Challenge starts Monday. To give myself a rough benchmark of what the 30 days does for me, I marked my beginning point with a quick test using a stopwatch.

I did 100 burpees for time. I wanted to honor you guys for making this commitment with me by doing my pre-test on the football field of the Stoneham Spartans, weirdly enough the high school where our kids will one day go.

The Stoneham High Spartan football field and my personal quasi-official burpee stadium.

Depending on where you stand now with your fitness, you could do all sorts of valuable tests. 25 burpee for time. Or 10 sets of X-number of burpees with x number of seconds of rest.

Those of you in the CrossFit world might remember a CrossFit Open workout in 2012 where you had seven minutes to do as many burpees as you could.

I'm not recommending that you burn yourself to the ground with this. You can if you want to. In my case, I wanted to clock my time for doing a certain number of burpees with good form and a good effort.

When the 30 days are over, I'll repeat the test with the same intention to see if there's any improvement.

By the way, great article channeling Carl Paoli on burpee form.

Getting ready to tackle a Spartan race? Download The Spartan 2018 Training Plan as your blueprint.

TJ Murphy

The Senior Editor of Spartan Life, T.J. Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author and former editor of Triathlete Magazine. His writing has also appeared in Outside & Runner's World.