Deck of Cards Workout

One of my favorite workout routine is the deck of cards workout. There are specialised card sets being sold online (just google) for the purpose of workouts, but all you really need is a normal deck of cards and some creativity. This is a great way to work on muscular endurance and a break from the monotonous routine of doing a set number of sets and reps.

After getting a set of playing cards, you need to assign individual exercises to each suit. 

In this example we assigned the following exercise to each suit of cards:

Spade: Squats

Heart: Push-ups

Club: Mountain Climbers

Diamond: Jumping Jacks

Next we assign a repetition value to each card:

Ace - 10: Face value

Jack: 11

Queen: 12

King: 13

During the exercise, you simply execute the exercise and reps you picked. For example:

Ace of Spade = 1 Squat

Queen of Diamond = 11 Jumping Jacks

9 of Hearts = 9 Push-ups

But nothing will bring the message across as simply as a video would. So if you want a better illustration of how the deck of cards workout progress, just watch the video below.

Do not limit yourself to just the 4 exercises in this article. There's a smorgasbord of exercises out there. If you are looking for a simpler workout, you can assign just 2 exercise to each colour, red and black. Or use the joker cards as well, assigning them a value of 20 or more. On the other hand, if a full set proves to be too much to handle, you can always remove some cards (for example, removing J, Q and K from each suit would reduce total rep from 91 to 55). The deck of cards is a very flexible workout tool, you set the difficulty of your own workout and let the cards do the rest.