Did You Hear The One About The Bear, The Crab, The Monkey & The Duck?

All jokes aside (maybe?) when it comes to exercise, you want to make things interesting. Being bored just sucks the fun out of doing something that's meant to get you in shape or keep you in shape. Although it is important to take training seriously because for one you want to maintain good health for as long as you can right? The other side of the coin is to make a workout work so well, you'll want to come back to it more and more or do it more often because you not only enjoy but it gives you a hell of a thrill.

That's one of the reasons why I love Animal Exercises so much, they allow you to freely move and harness your imagination to not only get great results but feel like it's not work but playing hard. From the dice games to flow routines and combos, there are so many ways to get in a great workout using the wild animals as your inspiration. One of my personal favorites for a while has been using a deck of cards which can be called the Animal Exercise Bible or the Animal Deck Of Madness (either way it's just a name). It consists of four Animals: Bear, Crab, Primate & Duck. It's 2 upper body animals and two lower body animals which target multiple muscle groups at the same time and works your conditioning, strength endurance, agility and your mobility. 

For a period with one of the lower body movements, I was doing an exercise called the chimp walk which I still do from time to time but have recently switched to an exercise that is based on wrestlers' type movements where it's somewhat like a lunge but you also reach out and pull as if to lunge and grab a hold of an opponent. I learned it from Eero Westerberg from Vahva Fitness and even though he isn't a wrestler, he was inspired by them and have seen a similar move people use in MMA and Amateur Wrestling. You can view it here....

The numbers on the cards can vary from workout to workout but today, the numbers on the cards were as follows.

Face Cards: 15 Steps/Reps

Aces: 20 Reps/Steps

Jokers: 50 Steps/Reps Of The Bear Crawl

2-10: Done As Shown. 

The objective is to get finish the deck as fast as possible. Now this doesn't mean you get sloppy and get lazy by not paying attention to form but to work the exercise as it intended to be with control and coordination. The speed will vary and it's not important to break world records by finishing in something like 10 minutes or whatever. These exercises are not just your typical type movements, there's a reasons wrestlers and grapplers have been using these exercises for a very long time and have stood the test of time. This can be used as a warm up to your MMA Workout or for conditioning in Football or Wrestling or as a stand-alone. It's not that difficult but it's not easy either so never underestimate it.

I've been doing deck of cards workouts off and on for years starting in my Post Rehab days of doing Combat Conditioning and evolving from there. I've written a few times on why I just don't like certain aspects of stationary exercises and feel like certain rules don't apply to me so I come up with my own workouts to suit my needs and Animals are the peak of conditioning exercises. Bodyweight Exercises have their place and if you're in close quarters like a hotel room, workouts like these are perfect for that but I love having that extra space to move around and I can go hard with Animal Exercises without getting sore. 

Be wild in your workouts and unleash the beast within. Grab a good deck, shuffle well and have at it and see how you do. Can't do a full deck yet? That's fine, do what you can and once you do, try to beat the deck every workout. Have fun and if you want to make some animal noises in the process, that's optional (recommend you do that alone).