If someone asked you what a burpee is, you probably have a solid answer: squat down, jump your feet out to a plank, jump them back to your hands, and jump up in the air with your hands above your head.
There might be some variation in answers: some don’t put their hands over their head, some add in a push-up, a lot of functional fitness athletes tend to jump their feet out and lie their bellies on the floor instead of performing a true plank.
The Guinness World Records also have their own standards for burpees, and they might not meet those at your gym. The start position is the squat, the feet need to jump back — but not necessarily into a plank or with the chest to the ground — and the jump just requires the hands and feet to leave the ground.
Now there’s a new Guinness World Record for burpees completed in 60 minutes by a female, set by 37-year-old Elizabeth Llorente from Melbourne, Australia. She trained for three months to tackle the record and completed 1,490 burpees, besting the previous record by 169 reps.
Here’s the footage.
[Read the history: How Mr. Royal H. Burpee Invented Everyone’s Least Favorite Exercise]
Her Instagram page describes them as “high plank burpees” and she was asked in a Sunday night interview on The Project a question you might have been asking: “Don’t regulation burpees require you to put your arms up in the air?” “And don’t you have to touch the ground at the bottom as well?”
Woah! Liz Llorente did 1490 burpees in one hour! She smashed the women’s world record and raised money for Multiple Sclerosis! #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/S7flij5eER
— The Project (@theprojecttv) May 6, 2018
It depends whose regulation you’re going by. So I went by the regulation that Guinness World Records have set.
For any record attempt, you’re going to do what you need to do just to get by and there was no specific regulation about the opening up at the top. (…)
The start position for the burpee for Guinness World Records is actually the bottom position, so the jump just needed to be hands and feet off the ground. So that’s exactly what I did to get as many out as I could.
No matter how she got the record, she did manage to raise almost $5,000 for multiple sclerosis research as she was training to make the feat. We can all agree that’s a positive outcome.
