A mile of burpee broad jumps isn’t most people’s idea of a fun challenge. Even for most NASCAR drivers, it’s far from a typical workout.
But Ricky Stenhouse has long embraced such physical challenges. He realized early on in his Cup Series career that, to improve his performance, he needed to do something more. That started with a strong interest in CrossFit, culminating in a CrossFit gym on his property.
Since then, Stenhouse has branched out to different styles of training, but he’s kept up the physicality under the guidance of his personal trainer, Ryan von der Rueden, who formerly worked with Kasey Kahne.
“Yeah, I think I’ve really worked since I hired my trainer, trainer Ryan. He was Kasey’s trainer, and, you know, Kasey was in great shape. For a long time, just really worked on heart rate stuff, you know, did a lot of CrossFit back in the day. And now I kind of do a little bit of everything.”
Having the trainer gives him someone to come up with workouts, but it’s both von der Rueden and Stenhouse himself who come up with challenges. For the burpee workout, it was Stenhouse making his trainer’s suggestion even harder.
“So there was a mile that’s, you know, burpee broad jump for a lap, lunges for a lap, bear crawl for a lap, and then you run a lap. And Ryan had mentioned it to me. And then I saw the – I don’t technically know if he’s the backup quarterback yet, but he’s trying to be the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears – Tyson, I saw that he was on ESPN and was talking about grinding his face off this offseason, trying to, you know, be in the best shape you can for camp,” Stenhouse explained.
“And he said he did, you know, burpee brawl jumps for a mile. And so, I texted Ryan. I was like, hey, here’s what we’re doing so and then my buddy Nate, I was like, hey, you want to do something dumb tomorrow? And he said sure. And he showed up and he was like, what are we doing?
“I was like, I thought I told you! He goes, no, you didn’t. So he showed up. Had no idea what we were doing. So that’s always fun. But yeah, we go back and forth.”
The challenge itself ended up being particularly arduous, but Stenhouse said he always does it with friends which makes it better.
“That was harder than I thought it was going to be mentally. Physically it was okay, but mentally it was draining after 1/4 of a lap on the 1st lap. I was ready to call it quits, but that’s what we signed up for,” he explained. “So we did it and it took way longer than expected. So two hours and 17 minutes of burpees is not a lot of fun, but it was a cool test.
“Yeah, I got some great buddies as well. We tend to just do dumb stuff like the most miles I had run before this offseason was 11 at one time and me and buddy set out on a 30-miler this offseason and now he wants to do 50. So yeah, we just do random stuff all the time and just see how it goes. So it’s a lot of fun. But you know, I do feel like, with my conditioning, In the race car, I feel really good compared to where you know I was 5-6 years ago.”
For Stenhouse, every bit of work to get a competitive edge is valuable, and making it fun just makes it better.
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