THE BATTLE AT THE BEACH – DAY 2
-- The Football Players Followed in the Footsteps of a Famous Wrestling Champion
For Day 2 of the Battle at the Beach, I brought something special with me: a stack of playing cards.
When they guys were ready to start, I had them stand in a long line parallel to the water and about 20 yards away from it.
Then we began doing a simple “deck of cards workout.” In this workout, I would draw a card from a well-shuffled deck, and the card would determine what exercise the guys would do, and how many reps they would do.
The suites determined the exercise. Each suite was a different exercise:
Hearts – Push-ups
Diamonds – Squats
Clubs – Bear-crawl to the water and back again
Spades – Start in a push-up position, jump up, sprint to the water, and sprint back
For the push-ups and squats, the card I drew determined the number of reps they did, which could range from not very many to more than enough to add up as they did the workout:
Numerical cards – do the number on the card, e.g., if I drew an 8, they did 8 reps.
Face cards (Jack, Queen, King) – Do 10 reps.
Aces – Do 12 reps.
The first Joker – do 20 pushups.
The second joker – do 20 squats and 10 additional jump squats.
The deck of cards workout is always different. It seems easy at first, especially if you draw some low-numbered cards – but it can get much harder very quickly. Drawing some high-rep cards from the same suite one after another can make things very challenging.
The deck of cards workout has an interesting history. I don’t know who “invented” it, but it was popularized by a legendary professional wrestler named Karl Gotch, who used it in his own workouts for many years, and later used it to train young wrestlers.
Gotch was born in Belgium in 1924. He began his pro wrestling career in Europe at the end of World War Two. As you can imagine, there weren’t many gyms available for a travelling wrestler, and he certainly couldn’t carry a set of weights with him, so he had to find a way to train pretty much anywhere with virtually no equipment.
The deck of cards workout filled the bill perfectly. Gotch would do it in his hotel room after his matches.
Gotch did a very rugged version of the workout that featured two push-up variations and two squat variations. I’ve never seen anything written by Gotch about his version of the workout, but according to many reports, it went like this:
Clubs – Jump squats
Spades – Hindu squats
Hearts – Hindu push-ups
Diamonds – Half-moon push-ups
1st Joker – 40 Hindu squats
2nd Joker – 20 Hindu push-ups
Rep counts for black cards (clubs and spades, i.e., for the push-ups) – Do the number of reps shown on the card – face cards are 10 reps – aces are 11 reps.
Rep count for red cards (hearts and diamonds, i.e., for the squats and jump squats) – Do twice the number of reps shown on the card – face cards are 10 reps x 2 = 20 reps – aces are 11 reps x 2 = 22 reps.
Gotch always finished the workout by holding a wrestler’s bridge for three minutes – a necessary exercise for all wrestlers, and a great exercise for all athletes.
When you begin, you probably won’t be able to finish the entire deck. Start with 20 or so cards and gradually work up to the entire deck. Your eventual goal is to blast through the entire deck without any rest between exercises.
For other variations of the deck of cards workout, grab Dinosaur Strength and Power Course No. 7, The Dinosaur Dirty Dozen. It’s available in a Kindle edition in the Kindle bookstore, and a PDF edition at my website.
Fun story. A wrestling promoter in Europe disliked Gotch for some reason, and put the 6’4” 260- pound athlete into a tiny hotel room not much bigger than a broom closet. It didn’t stop Gotch from doing his workout. He just turned the bed on one side, shoved it up against the wall, and went to work!
But back to the Battle at the Beach. The high school football players probably never heard of Karl Gotch, but that didn’t matter. They worked hard, and got in a great workout.
We kept going until the push-ups began to be hard and ragged – and then I sent them down the beach and back for a half-mile run.
After that, the coaches brought out a football, and the guys played 7 on 7 out on the beach.
They finished off by jumping into the water – which is awfully cold this time of year – and once again channeled their inner Navy SEAL.
It was another great workout, and I hope it helped set them up for success as they go through their spring practices, summer workouts, and move into the 2024 football season.
Have you ever done a deck of cards workout? If you did, leave a comment and tell us about it!