In September 2024, I decided to do 30 burpees every day for the rest of my life.
For over 15 years, I’d tried to build a training habit and fallen off every time. One cold or one deadline at work was enough to break the streak. Then I’d spend months working up the energy to start over.
I was tired of starting over.
When my daughter was born, I’d put on a lot of weight during the pregnancy.
My wife’s cravings somehow became a license for me to indulge too.
Then the weight crept up so gradually that years passed before I did anything about it. I always knew there’d come a day when I had to turn it around, but as a father with a 9-5, I didn’t have much time.
Whatever I did would have to be short, effective, and possible anywhere with no equipment.
Then I read that Spartan races punish failed obstacles with 30 burpees.
A burpee is a squat, a jump, a plank and a push-up in one sequence. It trains strength, power and conditioning at once, with no equipment. Nothing else asks for so little and gives back so much.
That sounded exactly right.
“Motivation is overrated,” I thought.
I’d been publishing something small every day for a few months by then, and it was going better than anything I’d tried before. Daily practice was building momentum, the one thing I’d always failed to build in the gym. The Spartan rule fit perfectly: all you need is the floor, and 30 burpees looked too simple to fail at.
One ordinary Saturday, I dropped down and did my first 30.
What does day one of a life-changing habit feel like?
Ordinary. Nothing special comes from doing 30 burpees once. But it took less than seven minutes, so I did it again the next day, and the day after that.
Eight months later, I still hadn’t missed a day, so I upped it to 50.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” — Bruce Lee
Over two years later, the streak is still alive: 33,630 burpees over 777 days.
That’s a number I couldn’t have imagined when I started, as a man who’d slipped into obesity for the second time in his life. In total, it took around 90 hours. It felt like far less.
It soon became something I just do, like brushing my teeth.
There have been days when the streak nearly broke.
A high fever, wrist pain, three-hour nights, a bout of vertigo abroad. Each time, the habit was small enough to survive anyway. I’d do the softest burpees imaginable, but I’d do them.
That smallness is what saved it.
There’s a reason every pro athlete still drills the fundamentals.
The physical payoff showed up first: bigger arms and a prouder posture, with my mother, my doctor and a colleague all commenting on it. The bigger payoff was proof that I could keep a promise to myself, every single day. Since then, I’ve added a weekly article, 8,000 steps a day on average, a monthly investment and a daily reading habit, and I haven’t broken any of them.
One small streak became a highway for every habit that followed.
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