Photo courtesy of Google Images.

So I’m sitting at the Levee last weekend, celebrating with a few new graduates (as well as some 6th-year juniors). I walk up to the bar and say, “Hey bartender, can I get a Bud Light?” He quickly grabs one, pops the top for me, and responds, “That’ll be 73 burpees”.

I did what any typical college student would do. I found some clear space in front of the bar and started my payment. After five minutes of sucking wind, my entire body burning and brand new Polo drenched with sweat, I chugged the beer in four long gulps. It tasted great, but was that really worth it? I knew that if I was going to get drunk that night, I might be too sore to get out of bed the next morning and make it to church.

Ok, so this (obviously) didn’t really happen. If you could pay for items with exercise, we would all have much thinner waists and much fatter wallets (which could combat our loathsome obesity problem, but that’s a topic for a whole different article). Instead, I want you to think of this as a calorie tradeoff.

Burpees are a simple exercise that constitute  a real calorie burner. To perform a burpee, follow these four basic instructions:

• Begin standing upright, squat down, and place your palms on the floor in front of you
• Kick your feet back into a full pushup position
• Bring your feet back to the original placement
• Jump up from this lowered position as high as you can

If you can perform this exercise more than 100 times without stopping, please give me or my physiology professors a call, as we would love to do some research on you. For an average 130-pound person, one burpee will burn about one calorie. For a larger, 190-pound individual such as myself, one burpee will burn about a calorie and a half. Let’s do the math here.

One 12-oz Bud Light = 110 calories
Calories burned for one burpee = 1.5 (at 190 lbs)
Burpees it takes to burn off the beer = 110/1.5 = 73.33
A typical night out for me involves consumption of, let’s say, 10 beers.
73.33 x 10 = 733.3 calories

Wow. So if my previously mentioned situation were real life, I would need to do at least 733 burpees to pay for all that beer. I imagine that last fraction of a burpee would be me collapsing to the floor once I got into the pushup position. Of course, this entire concept would be null considering I’d puke all over the floor of the bar if I actually attempted to do that many burpees while drinking. I most likely wouldn’t even need a drink to accomplish this.

However, I don’t want you to fear this beast of an exercise. If you’re trying to lose weight or simply watching your health, burpees are a great way to “pay off” the slip ups with junk food. You might even be able to talk yourself out of eating the junk food in the first place. That 300 calorie donut from Shipley’s sure does sound enticing, but do you really want to have to do 200 burpees later? You decide.

Burpees are not the only exercise you can use for this. Typically, cardiovascular activity such as running can be used as an alternative exercise in which a mile will burn about 100 calories for a 160-pound individual. Burpees are much more efficient way of burning calories, as muscles in the entire body are used instead of muscles of just the legs. Using this method of calorie tradeoff as a habit is a great weight loss and motivational tool to keep your healthy lifestyle in check. — Jon Lundahl, Exercise Science (Neuromechanics) Master’s student at the University of Mississippi.  He is currently participating in a summer internship with the strength and conditioning staff at Georgia Tech.

Email Jon Lundahl at jalundah@go.olemiss.edu