Focus on Fitness > Ace This Simple At-Home Workout

Focus on Fitness

Ace This Simple At-Home Workout

Are your at-home exercise options feeling a little stale? Change things up this winter and keep your fitness routine fresh! After all, February is Heart Month, and exercise is one of the best things you can do for your heart.

All you need is a little space, a timer and a deck of cards. This type of workout uses a deck of cards to randomly serve up different exercises and repetitions. Here’s how it works in three simple steps:

1. Shuffle the cards, remove the Joker cards, and then assign an exercise to each suit. For example, hearts can be arm circles, and spades can be leg kicks. Choose exercises that work for you and your unique goals, and browse these moves for ideas. The number on the card indicates the number of reps you’ll complete. A 6 of hearts represents six arm circles, as an example.
2. Decide what you’d like to do with the face cards (Jacks, Kings, Queens and Aces). One idea is to make each face card a simple timed move. For example, Queens can be 20 seconds of air punches and Kings can be 30 seconds of marching in place. You can even assign a face card as 30 seconds of rest, since this tends to be a faster-paced workout.
3. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and get moving! Draw a card and perform that movement and number of reps, working your way through the deck and remembering to take all the rest you need. If the timer goes off before you’ve gone through the deck, no problem at all. Do what you can and listen to your body. You can always make it a goal to one day get through an entire deck.

Keep things fun by pairing up with a workout buddy and doing the same workout virtually!