Playing Games with My Heart

I adore ZooFit for its ability to not take itself too seriously. We’re all about having fun in our fitness. Working out shouldn’t be a chore. It should be one of your favorite times of day.

There are dozens of ways to make working out fun. Recently, I started my one month trial on Daily Burn, an online fitness program with hundreds of workouts ranging from yoga and kickboxing to dance and weightlifting. Variety is always key for me. Daily Burn gives me lots of choices, but sometimes a little too much choice.

ZooFit thrives on variety. I enjoy mixing things up, but I try to incorporate core, cardio, legs, and arms into every workout. The best way to accomplish this is by playing games.

I have dozens of games I play. One of my favorites is playing Memory, which I’ve done with my classes several times. We’ve also played BINGO, Fate of the Die, and even an Easter Egg Hunt. I designed an Alphabet Game with exercises, and have several variations of Deck of Cards.

But recently, I discovered a new card game which took playing games to a whole new level. UNO, I discovered is a fan-freaking-tastic game to play as a workout.

Here’s how it works:

Assign an exercise to each color- Red, Blue, Yellow, Green. With four colors and four exercises, it’s easy to make the workout diverse, making one color cardio, another core, one legs, and the last one an arm movement.

But UNO has more than just color coordinated numbers cards. There are the directional cards of Skip, Draw 2, Reverse, Wild, and Wild Draw 4. These cards make it more fun and anticipatory, and much more of a game than any other workout I’ve played.

Skip means we skip the next card, Draw 2 doubles the next card, and Reverse repeats the last card. Wild cards are “dealer’s” choice, or they can be 1 of each exercise and Draw 4 are 4 of each exercise. 0’s are 30 second rest/water breaks.

To play, shuffle the deck really well and take turns drawing a card. Do the number of reps for the card drawn. It gets exciting when you can skip cards, have to repeat exercises, and switch things up from normal.

This new game is featured in my ZooFit Safari, as well as a brand new Conservation Hero WOD, and dozens of other workouts. It’s a great way to make fitness fun and think of it more as Adult Recess than something you have to endure and get over with. Working out shouldn’t be comparable to getting your teeth cleaned, or going to the DMV.

Start playing games with your fitness, and take your fitness to a whole new level.