What I've learned from doing 6000 burpees in 40 days
I did 6,465 burpees over the last 40 days.
That’s 10 burpees for each hour I was awake.
That’s an average of 162 burpees per day.
Here are my lessons learned:
Lessons Learned
- Starting is hard, every. single. set.
- Going from doing 0 burpees to 170 burpees in one day causes your whole body to be sore.
- I tried to get the burpees done every hour, but I wasn’t pharisaical about it.
- Before I went to bed, the burpees had to be done, and they were, every day.
- Some days, I stayed in bed a little later so I wouldn’t have to do more burpees.
- Once you get going though, it’s much easier to keep going, to a point.
- Many times I would be pondering something while I did it and would be surprised I completed my set so quickly.
- Increasing to 15 in a set really made a mental difference.
- It’s not that much harder to do 15 than 10 in a set, but the mental hurdle of starting a set is the biggest barrier, for me.
- When I started, I couldn’t “pop” up, I had to go to my knees, then stand up.
- I did not lose weight (in fact, I gained weight) but I did lose inches around my belly, and I
So many things are mental, even if they are physical. And by mental, what I really mean is spiritual.
Before God created the world, He created everything spiritually first, and so all things that are physical were spiritual first.
To me, that means that everything we do is spiritual first.
Spiritually getting myself started every set was the most difficult for me. It was not easy to get started.
In fact, the last two days, it was the hardest to get started. And on the last day of Lent, I didn’t start doing burpees at all that day until 2 pm!
I know I can do hard things. What made this powerful and doable, was that there was a deep spiritual connection to why I was doing it. I wanted to increase my spiritual preparation for Easter and trying Lent was a good way to do it.
When I had this spiritual connection, it wasn’t a question of whether I was going to do it or not. I was sure it was going to happen.
The mental challenge was not whether to do it, it was just working up the mental fortitude to do it now. There’s more to this, surely, isn’t there?
I did do some paper tracking to keep things ordered.
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