The Burpee is named for a physiologist named Royal Huddleston Burpee. For his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University in 1940, he invented the exercise as a way to assess the fitness of non-active adults. Burpee made participants perform only four Burpees at a time …
Originally, the exercise was called a “Squat Thrust” …
(via Randy Parish)
Gymnastics Coaching.com 