Here on Healthy Care US, we’re all about promoting exercise as the key to a healthy lifestyle. Working out just 3 to 4 times a week can lower your risk of developing heart disease, having a stroke, and Type II diabetes. Yet it’s also true that — even for those who want to get into better shape — establishing a consistent workout routine isn’t easy.
One easy solution you can try is to inject some fun into your workouts. Listen to your favorite podcasts as you jog, find a partner so you can push each other to do your best — or take on a themed workout. Themes help personalize your routine and make it more exciting. There are holiday themes, superhero themes, and even music themes you can try.
Today, we’re going to cover the poker workout. Since it involves using all 52 cards in a deck, it allows for a lot of variety — and it promises a full-body workout that will leave you sweating. We answer some questions you may have about the poker workout below.
How does it work?
The concept behind the poker workout is pretty simple. You’ll need to have a deck of cards, a timer, and a list handy. Each card in the deck is paired with a specific kind of exercise. To get things rolling, all you have to do is take a card and do the exercise assigned to it!
What do I do with the cards?
Simply assign an exercise to each card. However, cards like 3 of hearts and 3 of spades don’t need to be paired with different exercises. Experienced poker players know that this is because the suits don’t matter in poker: they’re all equal in ranking. You can just assign one exercise to each suit for a total of 4 unique exercises in the workout. Of course, don’t forget to shuffle the cards before you get started.
What exercises should I choose?
This depends on what you want to achieve with your workout. For our full-body poker workout, we recommend picking one exercise to tackle 4 of your major muscle groups. For example, you can do push-ups for spades, crunches for hearts, squats for clubs, and jumping jacks for diamonds. The whole exercise can be adjusted to focus on a specific area like your arms, legs, or core — simply pick four exercises that all work on that area. You can write your chosen suit-exercise pairings on a list so that you can refer to it throughout the session.
How many reps should I do per exercise?
This one’s pretty easy — the number on the card is your answer. Following our example earlier, a 10 of hearts would be 10 crunches. However, things get a little more complicated with the royal cards. Since they’re cards that are heavily featured in the highest ranking poker hands rankings, the rep math here is different. A jack corresponds to 11 reps, a queen to 12 reps, a king to 13 reps, and an ace to 14 reps.
How long should the entire workout be?
The answer to this also depends on how long you want to workout. However, don’t feel to go through the entire deck in one session. Exercise sessions can be harmful if done for too long, so try to cap your workout at 90 minutes maximum per day and 300 minutes maximum per week. This is obviously dependent on experience.
The poker workout is easy to do and covers all of your major muscle groups. If you already have playing cards at home, you don’t need to buy any additional equipment, either! With it, solidifying your exercise habit will become less of a challenge.
