Exercising with a deck of cards?

You might have noticed that Fitness, Strength and Focus have become larger parts of this blog recently.  This is true for many reasons…

1) You are far more likely to die of a health related issue than an attack from a goblin, exposure to the elements than you are a health related malody (Leading Causes of Death).  I am a stage 4 cancer survivor and I attrubute much of my ability of getting through it to how in shape I was at the time.

2) If you are fit, you are more likely seen as a hard target.

3) If you are fit, you are much more able to use the flight part of fight or flight.

4) If you are stronger, you will be better equipped if you have to fight… In today’s post Jess Banda of Banda Tactical Fitness, discusses 2 way the pushing power developed by the bench press can help you in 2 worst case scenarios.

5) Being in better shape means you get less fatigued and can more fast in competitions.

but lastly and most importantly

6) That is what I am concentrating on now and….  Because my blog!

As part of this effort, you have seen more links to Banda Tactical Fitness, if you follow me on Twitter (If not, you should) you hear me gripe about it and see my Fitocracy updates, all of this is trying to find something that works for me and add some variety.  Yesterday, I found a method that seems to offer me the motivation I need. It uses a Deck of Cards to define the order and sets of the workout.

After finding a deck of shuffled cards, you assign an exercise to each suit and the jokers.  You can then either let the numbers on the card define the number of repetitions (or some multiple) or go strictly by suit.

Yesterday I assigned the suits as follows…

Clubs – Push-ups
Diamonds – Pull-ups
Hearts – Burpees
Spades – Box Jumps
Jokers – .5mile walk/run

I also decided to let the cards have the same value they do in blackjack (2-10 are face value, face cards are 10 and Aces are 11).  The goal is to complete the entire deck as quick as possible (I did it in 45min dead, next time I’ll do it faster.)

Ultimately, this results in 95 reps of each exercise and a 1 mile run, but because you never know how many reps you need to do your muscles don’t get accustomed to number of reps and you can do some much faster.  I also found that even when I thought I needed a break, if I flipped over a card with a muscle group that had recovered or a low number of reps I would push through and keep going until I ran into something that I really did need to rest for.

This isn’t something I would do everyday, but it is a good variation to throw in for variety.