7 Things I Learned From Doing 100 Burpees A Day For A Month

Today marks the completion of the 2023 Make America Burpee Again (MABA) Challenge. This is an annual challenge that multiple F3 regions throughout the country participate in during the month of January. The challenge is simple: Do 3,100 burpees in January. You can do 100 every day, or you can bank a bunch and take days off. Other than that, there are no rules.

For posterity’s sake, my final numbers for this year’s challenge are:

• Total Burpees: 3280
• Most done in a single day: 350
• Number of Rest Days: 8
• Consecutive Rest Days: 4

And here are 7 things I learned during this year’s challenge:

I don’t like burpees

I’m kidding. Kind of. I think burpees are a great exercise, and will really help you get in shape. I incorporated them into a lot of my workouts. But after doing this many of anything you will be tired of it by the end of the challenge.

It’s better to just get them over with

Don’t try to spread them out throughout the day, thinking you can knock out a few here and there. That may work some days, but it’s not a good consistent strategy. I decided early on that it was best for me to just bite the bullet, get up early, and go somewhere and knock out my burpees for the day.

Breaking them up makes it easier

You don’t have to think in terms of starting at 1 and just going to 100 non-stop. For me, it was better to break them up into sets and throw some other exercises in with them. For example, I may do 10 burpees and then 10 sit-ups, and repeat that 10 (or more) times. Sometimes I would cycle through 2 or 3 additional exercises with my burpees and have a full blown workout routine.

You can do more than you think

At the onset, 100 burpees seems like a lot, and it can be if you’re trying to go through them non-stop. But by breaking it up into smaller chunks, I found that I was easily able to do more than 100 in a single session. In fact I would regularly do more than 100 on any give day. Which brings me to my next point…

You can do too many

it’s easy to get carried away once you realize you can get past 100. There were multiple occasions that I would make myself stop because I could tell if I kept going I would wind up getting injured. This is a taxing exercise, and too much of it can do more harm than good.

You need rest days

The beauty of the way this challenge is laid out is that it allows you to take a day (or 4!) off to recover. Yes, burpees help you get in great shape, but they do it by breaking down and repairing your muscles. If you don’t give your body a day or two to recover, you may wind up hurting yourself.

It’s as much of a mental challenge as it is physical

The hardest part of this challenge is getting out of bed and making yourself go do burpees day after day. I lost count of how many time I thought “this is stupid” or “I don’t want to do this” or I wish this was over”. But I made myself get up and go do it anyway.

And I’m glad I did!

Kind of.