Comment by Balgair
3 years ago
It took me until the pandemic to find an exercise routine that worked for me. When it all started, I knew that I had to get a healthy routine put in place or the WFH was going to really wreck me. So, I googled around a bit, tried some exercise routines, and found a good one. I've been on it since and look forward to doing it about 3x a week. The key for me was pairing it with a favorite podcast. I can only listen to that podcast when I'm exercising.
The routine is called the 'Deck of Pain': Choose 4 exercises (push-ups, squats, etc). Shuffle a deck of cards and take one from the top. For each suit, you do one of the exercises chosen, the number of pips being the how many of that exercise you do. So, for say, a 2 of clubs, you do 2 push-ups. For a 9 of diamonds, you do 9 squats. Etc. You chose your own workouts. Face and Ace are whatever you'd like, I choose 1 as the Ace, and 10 as the Face cards. Go though as many cards as you can. Do you heard that? That's the sound of your soul leaving your body.
It's real hard at first. I'd only start with a quarter deck and be wasted. It took me ~9 months to be able to get through all 54 cards. After ~2.25 years of it, I can get through a deck in about 45 minutes.
This sounds interesting and intriguing. Which exercise do you have for each suit? Do you also cycle through different exercise assignments (say, in different months or weeks)?
Yeah, thanks.
I rotate the exercises. Right now it's squats, push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. I've done variations on all those in the past. Like, squat variations can be lunges, jump-squats, etc. Since all suits add up to the same number, the association between the exercise and suit is just incidental. I was working on single-arm push-ups, but hurt my shoulder and had to go back down to just regular push-ups.
I'll rotate card decks too. There are some fun little games out there that you can steal card decks from. For instance, take the cards out of a Catan set and then assign exercises and values to them. Go get a 5 suited deck online. Or grab a new game you've not tried before at Target or wherever.
Recently, I've been using a Tarot deck. Minor arcana as I described above, major arcana as individual exercises. So 5 of cups is still something like 5 pull-ups. But the Empress is 10 burpees, the Tower is a 1 minute plank, that kind of stuff.
The key for me was the randomization element. Having the cards and exercises come out at random kept me from 'counting down the miles', so to speak. It keeps my mind fresh and guessing at the next thing and not just waiting for things to be done with.