It's the burpee. Who hasn't been forced against their will to perform a lot of reps? Gym teachers and drill instructors swear by the efficacy of the ultimate full-body workout that doesn't require equipment.
It may turn out that your lousy gym teacher was correct when he said that burpee improves endurance in teenagers as well as improving short term memory.
The military has a famous exercise that involves shooting your legs out behind you into a plank position, performing a pushup, and then jumping up.
The study involved 52 teenaged boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 16 and was published in the journal Environmental Research and Public Health. The adolescents were divided into two groups for four months. The latter followed the same program but added an all-too-dreaded exercise to it. As the study went on, the teenagers started by doing 60 seconds of burps.
In a 2000 meter run, the adolescents involved in the burpee program ran a 8.6 percent improvement. The data shows that teens stuck in the control group were 1.9 percent quicker than the others.
Even before getting to the cognitive effects, it may seem obvious that performing burpees would improve endurance, but it surprised the researchers just how effective they were at making the teens better runners. The burpee exercise has not been shown to be an effective part of physical activity for adolescents.
When you look at short term memory, things get even more intriguing. The adolescents involved in the burpee program showed a 26 percent improvement in the well-known and reliable Jacobs test, a short term memory evaluation that uses a digit span that participants must remember in the same order the numbers were presented in.
The researchers admit that they don't know if the burpee exercise caused the positive effects or if it was the interaction with the program. It's hard to say if it's a case of direct memory improvement or just teens getting more engaged in the study.
Adding the burpee to an exercise program constitutes a preliminary practical approach to improving the effectiveness of physical education programs.
The researchers stress that finding the right balance is crucial, so it doesn't mean teenagers should be told to go all out on burpee. Too little exercise wouldn't result in significant improvement, whereas too much could physically and psychologically drain them, and possibly demotivate them from doing more. Teenagers can be unpredictable.
The researchers recommend that future studies focus on the amount of exercise needed for optimal improvement.
It's too early to say for certain, but the findings are intriguing. It won't turn your average teen into a savant with eidetic memory, but as the study and decades of widespread adoption have shown, it will be good for them.
Scientists found that lifting weights for just three seconds is quite good for you.
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