Last month I was looking for ways to add variety to my morning exercise routine (weights and yoga/core on alternating days, plus the jumprope I talked about earlier). I ran across a mention of FitDeck, which I’d heard of before but never tried. They make “exercise playing cards” where you shuffle a deck of, say, dumbbell exercises, draw a card, and do the exercise it says.
I checked it out and discovered they have a deck for swimming. Since my speed drills and technique drills were getting boring–I don’t know that many–I ordered it. It’s made my drill workouts a lot less boring. I’m still just going back and forth in the pool, but at least every workout isn’t exactly the same.
The cards include maybe a dozen technique drills, which include the small number of drills I was already doing, plus a bunch of new ones. There aren’t quite as many speed drills, and I find the sprints a little long–I can only sprint one length of the pool, or a length and a half, so I run out of steam on those. But it’s good to push myself, since on my own I was only doing that one length at sprint pace.
I also got the pilates cards out of curiosity. I’m not impressed–the cards are fine, they’re well done, there’s 50 of them (more than the swimming cards) and after a few weeks I still haven’t done all of them, so it’s a nice variety, but pilates itself just seems weird. It’s like someone stuck various abdominal moves and yoga poses together. Most of them don’t even seem to work the core muscles very much.
Apparently the original pilates uses equipment, and of course at home I have none. But “mat pilates” does seem to be a thing. Have any of you tried it? Do you find it worthwhile? Is there a good source for learning the exercises other than classes? I’m tempted to just stick with various crunches.
I never did get the bodyweight and dumbbell decks that I was originally looking for, but I’m keeping them on my wishlist for the future.