CrossFit coach smashes fitness record by performing over 900 burpees in an hour

A CrossFit coach with a love for burpees broke a record with her favourite exercise.

Lien Van Hemelen (Belgium) performed the most chest to ground push up burpees in one hour (female) – a whopping 926 of them.

That works out as just over 15 burpees a minute.

Each move starts face down with the chest in contact with the ground and arms in a push up position. The chest and torso are then lifted off the ground in a push up and the body is raised until the arms are straight.

The feet then jump back in one movement and the competitor should jump off the ground so neither the hands or feet are touching the surface, before returning to the same position on the ground, and repeating.

Lien, a 37-year-old mum-of-two, set the record while the world was in lockdown in 2020.

The idea came about after she was reading a Guinness World Records book and chatted to her coach Stijn Cuypers about whether it might be possible for her to break the record.

“Burpees were definitely not an unfamiliar movement for me,” Lien explained. “I believe the specific burpee training started about four to five months before the event.

“Both the training sessions and the record attempt took place during the corona period. There were many times when it was forbidden to train in the CrossFit gym. So training burpees at home was often the ideal solution.”

Doing them non-stop for an hour was a gruelling task though.

Lien added: “It was both physically and mentally a difficult hour. During the training sessions leading up to it, things didn’t always go smoothly. So, there was quite a bit of uncertainty about whether I would actually be able to achieve it.

“Together with my coach, I had worked out a schedule with the number of burpees I would do per time slot. However, just past halfway, I couldn’t keep up with it and had to rely on my coach’s calculations.

“It was only in the last three minutes that I knew I could just break the record.”

Lien finished her attempt feeling exhausted but jubilant that she’d managed to reach her goal.

“It was definitely not guaranteed that I would succeed, and that made the joy even greater,” she confessed.