oh, the burpee. Who hasn’t been forced against his will to do too many hard repetitions of this exercise? Touted as the best full-body workout that requires no equipment, it’s trusted by gym teachers and instructors around the world.
As exhausting as it may be, it may turn out that your lousy gym teacher was right: New research suggests that burpees not only improve stamina in teens, unsurprisingly, but may also be linked to a noticeable improvement in short-term memory as well.
For those unfamiliar, the infamous exercise popularized by the military involves squatting from a standing position, stretching your legs behind you into a plank position, performing a push-up and then jumping, and then repeating, often until satiety.
published in the magazine Environmental Research and Public Health, the study 52 adolescent boys and girls between 15 and 16 years old participated, since existing studies show that this period of life is especially sensitive to improve resistance. For four months, the researchers divided the adolescents into a control group and an experimental group. The former participated in a typical resistance program that did not include burpees, while the latter followed the same program but with the dreaded exercise added. In practice, the teens began by performing 60-second burpees, with the duration increasing as the study progressed.
The researchers found that teens involved in the burpee program ran 8.6 percent faster in a 2,000-meter race (about 1.25 miles). Meanwhile, the teens caught in the control group were only 1.9 percent faster, which the data indicates is not a statistically significant difference.
Even before we get to cognitive effects, it may seem obvious that performing burpees would improve endurance, but it surprised even the researchers how effective burpees were in making teens better runners than Jane’s simple endurance program of the control group . In fact, the researchers note that, to date, “there have been no scientific studies showing that the burpee exercise is an effective element of physical activity for adolescents.”
Things get even more interesting when you look at short-term memory. According to the study, teens who participated in the burpee program exhibited a whopping 26 percent improvement on the well-known and trusted Jacobs test, an assessment of short-term memory that uses a span of digits that participants must remember in the same order in which the numbers were presented. in.
Curbing expectations a bit, the researchers admit that they “don’t know if the burpee exercise caused these positive effects per se or if it was the interaction with the program.” In other words, it’s hard to tell if this is a case of direct memory enhancement, or simply that the teens are getting more excited and engaged as a result of their participation in the study. And, of course, the study says nothing about how burpees might affect fitness or cognition in other age groups.
Still, the results are significant enough for the researchers to propose that “adding the burpee to an exercise program constitutes at least a preliminary practical approach to improving the effectiveness of physical education programs such as the one adopted.”
As a caveat, that doesn’t mean teens should be instructed to do burpees, as researchers stress that finding the right balance is crucial. Too little exercise won’t result in significant improvement, while too much could exhaust them physically and psychologically, and perhaps discourage them from doing more burpees. Teenagers can be fickle.
Future studies, the researchers say, should focus on the dose of exercise needed for optimal improvement.
It’s early days, but the findings are intriguing, though far from definitive. It is possible that the improvement is due to the slight increase in exercise volume, rather than the exercise itself. However, regular burpees won’t turn your average teen into a savant with an eidetic memory, but as study and decades of widespread adoption have shown, it’s probably still going to be good for them.
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