All the Classic Greek Games… and others I made up

Last Saturday in kids class, as hordes of children jogged past us, I turned to Lara and asked her “wanna play Frogger?” Then today, during our YMCA class, as she watched the students going through the end of class workout, she turned to me and said “looks like some sort of video game.”

Perhaps spending many of my formative years playing video games WAS worth something. In enabled me to come up with strange ways to make both children and adults sweat.

The bulk of the class was spent learning “two step” – a drill that leads students into the start of “sticky hands”. Both drills are intended to develop sensitivity. That is, can you feel when your partner is going to hit you, can you relax and finally – can you get out of the way.

The ending though (pictured above) was the video game finish. Students had to deadlift the medicine balls and put them in the square holsters, bear walk across the floor to the mats, do 5 sit ups, crab walk back across the floor, deadlift the medicine balls OUT of the square holsters and then repeat the process as many times as they could in five minutes. Now that I look at it, the workout seems less like a video game and more like some cursed Greek figure like Tantalus or Sisyphus… although early video games were fairly Sissiphean in character…