One of my favorite types of workouts is called “Deck of Cards”. It’s exactly what it sounds like, using a deck of cards to tell you what your workout will be. You assign an exercise for each suit, shuffle the deck, and then draw cards and your rep count will be the number that’s on the card (I usually make face cards 10 and Aces are 15), and repeat until you go through the whole deck. I also use the Jokers in my deck and assign them a particularly challenging exercise, such as running for me (do I need to write a full blog post on why I don’t run?).
These workouts are especially good if you want to work on particular exercises, since you will end up doing 99 reps of each exercise. It’s also good for when you don’t have a lot of fancy equipment, as doing 99 reps of each exercise will definitely work your body! In fact, Deck of Cards workouts are super fun, easy, inexpensive, and portable. They can go anywhere with you and you can have hundreds of workouts at your fingertips.
Today was our third workout since returning home from Europe, and I was somewhat tired of feeling like I was half-assing a WOD, so I decided it was time to break out the burpees. I need to work on my pathetic push-ups, so we added that exercise, and for some reason Chris wanted to do some sit-up exercises, so we added V-ups (which are really just evil sit-ups). And since running is such a chore, we made that our Joker card. It ended up being a nice, challenging 40 minutes routine. Check it out:
Yeah, I think we are getting back into the routine now. Whenever we do a workout that kicks our butt yet we’re happy about it, is a good sign. Deck of cards got really fun when we had to do 30 Burpees in a row, yikes