Category: General

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What you need to know before you start P90X — Part 1

I am just a regular guy. I am not a gym rat. I have no desire to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, rather, what he used to look like).

If you are just a regular guy who is wondering if P90X is right for you, read on, because it just might be exactly what you need, so I’ve put together a set of “rules” that I came up with based on my experience with P90X.

RULE #1: YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE — OR WANT TO BE — A MUSCLEHEAD TO BENEFIT FROM P90X.

What I usually tell people is that my primary fitness goal — as far as looks go — is to make sure my chest sticks out farther than my gut. To measure this, I simply put on a properly sized t-shirt and stand up straight. Is my gut pushing out against the shirt? If the answer is “yes”, I have more work to do.

If you are, like myself, a man of a certain age, i.e. 40-plus, your fitness goal probably also includes the shrinking of a lifetime’s worth of accumulated gut fat. You may have tried other fitness programs. You may have looked around at your peers, noted that most of them are even fatter than you — except that one skinny guy, who you’re pretty sure is an alcoholic, and the well-built dude, who must just have good genes — so you have resigned yourself to the fact that as we get older, we just get fatter, nothing can be done about that.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I figured I was out of time and out of luck. I was walking a lot (15,000 to 25,000 steps per day), I could do 200 pushups in an hour, I was doing crunches, I, er, owned a pullup bar. My age, I figured, must just be doing me in.

I had not heard of Tony Horton”s P90X — I guess I don’t watch enough late-night tv, or, maybe, on second thought, I watch just the right amount — until my brother told me about it. He had always been a stocky guy who had to watch his weight, and he’d been in-and-out of bodybuilding all his life, so when he described the program to me, I figured it was only for guys who loved to wear speedos, shave their body hair, and stare at themselves in the mirror all day, so I didn’t bite.

I guess I reached the tipping point in February 2010. I was tired of spending hours a day walking for exercise with no apparent health benefit. I was treading water — at best — with my weight. Well, okay, it was steadily creeping up from a recent low of 180 to a precarious 195. Still quite a way from my peak of fatness at 235, but I knew the signs. It was only a matter of time before I would be there again … and beyond.

I told my brother to order me P90X. That was easily the best fitness decision of my life.

All that leads me to the gist of the matter, which is that if you are a regular guy who just wants to get into shape, you may have seen the P90X infomercials and thought, “That’s not for me.” But it worked for me, and it can work for you, too.

RULE #2: STICK TO THE DIET PLAN.

Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.

I knew this going into P90X, so I was very willing to adjust my diet to 50% protein – 30% carbohydrate – 20% fat, as prescribed by the program’s diet guide.

“Diet!” you exclaim. “I thought this was an exercise program.”

Sure, it is, but please refer back to the first sentence of this section. “Your body composition is determined 80% by what you eat and 20% by what you do.” You can work out all you want, but if you are going to eat like a pig, you’ll continue to look like one, although, admittedly, you will probably have a pretty decent body underneath all the fat.

But this is no regular diet, so don’t worry that you will be starving yourself. According to the P90X calorie requirement calculator, I could have eaten about 2400 calories per day on their plan. I cut that back to a goal of 2000, so that way if I went over a bit, I was okay. You may not think that is a lot of calories, but when half of them are protein, it’s pretty challenging to hit that goal.

One thing I will tell you right now is that when I started P90X, I gave up all sugary sweets. Everything. No cake, no pie, no candy, no you-name-it. You obviously don’t need to do that, but I had to do it that way — go off it completely — because I am not good at moderation. I can honestly say that I haven’t missed that stuff at all. Perhaps in the future there will be a time when I can add some of it back into my diet — in severe moderation. I do still eat fruit and other naturally sweet things, but sugar for me is a no-no.

RULE #3: PUSH THE ENVELOPE, BUT TAKE IT SLOW AND STAY WITHIN YOUR ABILITY.

P90X is tough. You may find that you cannot, even at the end of the 90 days, finish the routines without modifications. For sure, for me, the pullups will take a lot more time to get where I want them to be. I can’t even come close to putting up the numbers they do in the videos.

That is really one of the beauties of the program. I mean, what good is an exercise program, if you can complete all the moves right from the start? I was on that program, and it involved walking for hours on end every day. Where did that get me, besides from here to there and back again?

My greatest fear when I started P90X was getting hurt, because that’s what I do – I tend get all excited about a program, and I throw myself in there, push it too far, hurt myself, and I am out of commission. That’s why I say “push the envelope, but take it slow”. You surely need to push yourself to improve, but don’t go overboard and get hurt.

Tony provides modified moves for many of the exercises. Use them, if you need to, with the goal being to keep working, and testing the water every so often, until you don’t need the modification — you may find this happens rather quickly.

RULE #4: TAKE EXTRA BREAKS WHEN YOU NEED THEM.

This is really a continuation of the last thought, but it’s important, so I want to beat it to death.

It’s a DVD. Hit pause. Take a few extra breaths, then start back up again. You will be amazed at how fast you improve.

RULE #5: WRITE IT DOWN!

Speaking of how quickly you improve, the best way to see it, besides looking in the mirror, is to use workout sheets to write down your reps and the weights you used.

This will also assist you next time you go to do the exercise, because you will easily be able to see how much weight you did last time, so you can quickly adjust the dumbbells. Trust me, it’s tough to remember, so writing everything down is a must.

And that’s it for this post, but I’ll post more P90X “rules” in the next few days. In fact, here’s Part 2.

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Setting your own rules (and then following them)

I’ve never had a problem with rules.

That’s not to say that I like rules when other people impose arbitrary ones on me — I don’t — but I understand why that happens. After growing up in a semi-strict household, attending a Baptist university for 2 years, and spending 20 years in the military, I suppose I’m just accustomed to living by rules.

When it comes down to it, I believe the main reason I don’t mind rules is because I like a streamlined life without a lot of surprises, i.e. I don’t want to deal with the consequences of breaking the rules.

For example:

  • I don’t smoke pot, because it’s illegal and I don’t like the variables involved
  • I overpay on my taxes, because I don’t want to end up on the short end of an audit
  • I drive an acceptable speed on the highway, because I don’t want to deal with being pulled over

And so on…. Some would call me overly cautious. Whatever.

Anyway, when I find myself in need of some added discipline in my nutrition consumption, I set new rules for myself.

Recently I have found myself staying up later, and so doing a lot of late-night snacking — sometimes 1000 calories worth. That’s not good! I don’t need those extra calories, and there is no real reason to be doing the snacking.

That called for a new rule: No eating after 8:00pm.

At various times in my life, I

  • quit caffeine for 18 months, because I wanted to see if life was better without it — it wasn’t
  • quit drinking for 18 months, because I was having liver issues — my liver is fine, but now I drink a whole lot less, because I found I enjoyed not drinking
  • quit grains for 6 months, because I wanted to see what that was like — it was okay, but I’ve added grains back into my diet in quite a bit more moderation than before
  • quit eating meat for 36 months, because I wanted to break my fast-food habit — it worked!

For whatever reasons, I set those rules for those times in my life when I felt I needed them, and I somehow stuck with them until they were no longer necessary.

How about you? Can you create some rules to help yourself reach a goal? If you think that might work for you, create those rules and stick to them!

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Excuses, excuses

One of my favorite mantras is “there’s always a good reason not to do something.” There is. I can always come up with some really good reasons why I should not do something that I need to do.

In the fitness arena, the good reason could be a sore or pulled muscle, a really busy schedule, sickness — you name it.

I pride myself, however, on being able to work through or around those excuses. That’s really what they are, after all, excuses.

How can a legitimate injury or sickness be an excuse? Those sound like valid reasons to skip a workout, don’t they?

Sure, but that’s why the mantra: There is ALWAYS a good reason not to do something. If I let the good reasons keep me sidelined, I’d be sidelined more often than not.

Pulled muscle? Don’t work that muscle, or, better, just work it less. Unless it’s a really severe pull, working the muscle lightly will help it heal faster.

Busy schedule? Get up earlier. Stay up later. Be creative with exercise by walking and working when you would normally be sitting and working — for example, walk around while on the phone. Traveling? Walk briskly through the airport. Use your luggage for some resistance training. Stuck in the office? Put your pullup bar in your office doorway and sneak a few in whenever you get a chance.

Sick? Got a cold, or, more likely it seems, allergies? Work through it. If it is indeed a cold, you may want to avoid heavy breathing, but you can still do some resistance training.

There is always a good reason not to do something, no doubt about it. But to have success in our fitness programs — or in any part of our lives — we need to push those excuses aside, and do what we know we need to do.

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The importance of chewing

I am a fast eater. Always have been, at least since my college days, perhaps prior to that as well. Not sure why I am that way, but I do know that when dining with friends, I am among the first to finish a meal.

I am attempting to put an end to that.

A friend of mine some time ago — so long ago I can’t remember his name (oh, wait, I think it was Wallace Berry) — used to make a big deal about chewing. He insisted that each bite should be chewed thoroughly. He had a precise number of times, I forget the number (seems like it was in the 20s), that he chewed each bite of food to ensure its proper mastication and digestion.

Okay, maybe that guy was a little OCD, but he had a point, and I’ve always remembered it.

Why chew? Here’s what I’ve found from reading and experimenting.

“Chewing gears up the rest of the digestive system, gets it ready to process incoming nutrition.” This sounds tenuous to me, but maybe. Maybe that’s why chewing gum gives you gas (supposedly — I’ve read about this phenomenon, but I don’t chew gum, so I don’t know if it’s true for me or not).

“Chewing gives your system more time to process the food, to understand how much food you’ve consumed, and to more readily let you know when you are full.” Again, this sounds a bit nonsensical to me. How much time does my stomach really need to let my brain know it’s full? It’s not like I swallow a whole stomachful of food at once.

“Chewing adds saliva to the food, which helps break it down.” Digestion is a mechanical AND chemical process, so this makes sense, exposing more of the food’s surface area to the chemicals in saliva would be beneficial.

“Having been chewed helps when the food hits the gastric juices in the stomach.” This is to me the most obvious benefit of chewing. I mean, if you were to drop an intact hunk of steak into a jar of acid, and a chewed up hunk into a different jar of acid, it’s easy to imagine which would dissolve first. (For those of you who have problems with imagination, the chewed up hunk will.)

But why did I call that “the most obvious benefit of chewing”? I have a very practical reason: The longer your food takes to digest, the more gas you produce, and we all know how uncomfortable that can be.

I’ve experimented with chewing more over the past couple of weeks, and I have definitely noticed some improvement in my gastric comfort. I’ll continue to work on my chewing — after all, a lifetime of bad chewing is not going to fix itself that easily — and see what happens.

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Do you drink too much?

Let me preface this article by clarifying that I am not an anti-alcohol crusader. In fact, I just recently posted my recipe for the world’s best limoncello and also wrote an article about why you can still drink even if you are trying to get fit.

Each of us has to come to our own conclusions about alcohol and figure out how much is the right amount. For us. Not for anyone else, because we are all unique individuals.

I can only judge me, and I know I used to drink too much. No question. I would drink almost every night and would not stop until I was wasted. I even got a DUI back in the day.

That DUI was a wakeup call — sort of.

BeersAfter the DUI, I quit drinking for 90 days — court-ordered. Surprisingly to me at that time, I had no problem not drinking, even though I thought I would. I guess I took it as a challenge.

(Keep in mind that I am one of those people who follows the rules. I may not agree with the rules, but I always try to follow them, because I don’t want to suffer the consequences. This means I probably drive slower than I need to, pay more taxes than I have to, and generally miss out on some stuff that people who live looser and freer enjoy, but so be it. I prefer a more predictable life.)

After the 90 court-ordered days of sobriety were up, I went back to drinking, but not as much, and never when I was going to be driving. (Well, unless I was driving a golf cart. I narrowly averted disaster one day on the golf course while engaged in a cart race while driving backward. My cartmate ended up getting stitches in his head after he fell out….)

When I moved to Texas, I got into the local music scene, which meant I was spending a lot of time in bars with people who liked to get hammered, so ….

Fortunately, beyond the incidents described above, I never injured anyone or got into any kind of trouble from drinking.

But in the mid-2000s, when my doctor put me on a cholesterol medication that messed with my liver, that is when I quit drinking completely for 18 months.

So, honestly, while maybe professional I should have, I never came to any great epiphany about my consumption of alcohol. I quit because I felt my medical condition required it, and you know what? I enjoyed so much being able to drive home from the shows at night without worrying about cops in my mirror, that even now that my condition is resolved and I’ve hopped off the wagon, I don’t over-consume when I’ll be driving, and I often don’t consume any alcohol at all when I’m out. Saves me a ton of money, too.

Do I have as much fun as I used to? Nope. But I figure I’ve been there, survived that, no need to push the envelope, knowwhatimean?

How about you? Do you drink too much? Only you can decide. But maybe this questionnaire from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism can help.

The questionnaire is only 10 questions. There is a whole long assessment process, but if you simply answer the questions honestly and take a good hard look at the results, you should gain some insight into your drinking habits.

Maximum score is 40, and the higher your score is, the more problematic your drinking may be. I scored a 7. How did you do? What does that tell you about your relationship with alcohol? Is it time to make some changes?