Category: P90X

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P90X: A Lifetime Commitment?

A friend of mine told me the other day that she was interested in Tony Horton’s P90X, but didn’t want to be stuck doing it for the rest of her life.

I laughed, because those are almost the exact words I said to my brother when he was trying to get me into P90X. I wanted to be in better shape, but I didn’t want to commit my life to it, ya know? I have other things to do besides spending all my time working out.

Having been through the program a couple times, and now nearing the end of Insanity, I was able to tell my friend in all sincerity, “You won’t be stuck doing it for the rest of your life. But you will be so impressed with the results, you will want to do it for the rest of your life.”

And that is a fact, or, at least, that’s how it worked for me.

P90X is a very well thought-out program. As I was going through it the first time, I noted that the exercises flowed well together, the routines were well-placed, the recovery days came at just the right time.

In addition to the exercises, though, along with P90X you get:

1. A Nutrition Guide. This is very important, because you truly are what you eat. Exercise is great for toning and building muscle and other parts of your body, like your brain and skeleton, but when it comes to losing fat, you will have a hard time doing that without watching what you eat.

This is not as restrictive as it seems. I went on a 50% protein, 30% carb, 20% fat diet the day I started P90X, and in order to consume all the calories I needed, I had to add protein shakes!

Here is a calorie calculator that is pretty cool, if you want to see how many calories you’ll need to consume: http://bit.ly/l41F21. Select “5 times/week (intense)” for exercise your level.

You’ll see this is no 1200-calorie/day diet. You need the extra calories to allow you to “bring it” during the workouts.

2. A life-after-P90X plan. This the part that really impressed me as I read it before I started the program. I knew I didn’t want to be Mr. Gym Rat. I wanted to get fit, then maintain what I had, not necessarily keep growing muscle and getting fitter.

The Life-After-P90X plan includes a workout schedule that is very much toned down, but still allows you to keep 80% of what you’ve gained from P90X. Should you do another iteration of the full program from time to time? Sure.

But here’s the key: You will want to.

My body was in so much better shape after just 4 weeks of P90X, I had no doubt that I would keep doing this, or something like this, for the rest of my life.

So, is P90X a lifetime commitment? It doesn’t have to be … but, if your experience is the same as mine, you’ll want it to be.

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How many reps should you do in P90X?

When I started Tony Horton’s P90X, one of the first decisions to make was whether to go for larger muscles or simply toned muscles. Tony would repeat over and over: 8-10 reps for mass or 12-15 reps for lean.

I have no desire to look like Tony Horton. He’s very muscular, has a bodybuilder’s body, and that’s just not me. But, hell, I could stand for my muscles to be a bit larger, so I decided to go the route most men take through P90X and shoot for 8 to 10 reps of each move.

To explain a bit more, the idea is to adjust the weight you use to work properly for the number of reps. That is, regardless of how many reps you do, the last two or three should be difficult. So if you’re shooting for 8-10 reps, you should be struggling on reps 7, 8, and 9. If you are not, you need to increase the weight.

Tony never gets into the lower rep side of things, probably because he is a bodybuilder, not a powerlifter, but you should know that HEAVY WEIGHT + LOW REPS = STRENGTH! You won’t necessarily get the muscle size, but your strength will increase dramatically with this approach.

Here, then, is a quick rundown on the whole number of reps concept. Tom Venuto includes this information in his article on his website.

  • If you are trying to improve strength, then most of your weight training will be in the 3 to 5 rep range. You may even do some 1 and 2 rep moves. This will make you stronger and faster without bulking you up.
  • Bodybuilders work on muscle mass, so most of your training will be in the 8 to 10 rep range. Doing some heavier weight training at lower reps makes sense, too, because you may not want to simply look strong.
  • To tone up, you should work in the 12-15 rep range. This is also useful for bodybuilders, to smooth things out.

I spend most of my time doing 8-10 reps. When doing body weight exercises, like pushups, I do as many as possible, so I have the high-rep end covered.

I have not, however, done anything in the lower rep range, and it seems to me I need to do that, so I’m going to try to work that into my workouts starting after this current recovery week.

Remember that fitness is not just finding one thing and doing that. That’s a good start, but fitness is really a lifelong commitment that involves reading and learning and implementing new techniques to stay as fit as possible.

So be sure to determine your fitness goals and then make an informed decision about how many reps to do based on those goals.

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Chest & Back Workout

“Chest & Back” is the first routine in Tony Horton’s P90X, probably because every guy wants to work his chest and every guy needs to work his back, so it’s a good way to get things rolling.

(Sure, women need P90X too, but I’m a guy, so I really have to speak from a guy’s perspective.)

There is a great chest and back routine in Tony’s One-On-One series, too. It’s called 30/15 and consists of Tony attempting to do alternating sets of 30 pushups followed by 15 pullups, for a total of 24 sets. He only makes it partway through before he has to switch to 25/15, then 25/12, but you get the idea. That routine will pump you up.

Because I am a P90X disciple, I tend to do chest and back on Mondays, which is the first day of my weekly workout schedule. But, as you may by now know, I also like to mix it up, so I made up my own routine called, quite unimaginatively, Steve’s Chest & Back.

I decided that I’m going to provide you with the routines I make up myself. That way, if you don’t want to spring for P90X you can still have some guidance from someone who has been through the program.

This routine, which I’ve done for the past two Mondays now, gives me a good pump, wears out my muscles, and lasts about an hour.

It requires a pullup bar — I use the over the doorframe kind — and for the pushups, if you like, pushup bars.

I use a chinup bar I purchased from Beachbody.com, but you can probably find a good one at Dick’s or Wal-mart even. Wherever you get yours, I recommend a pullup bar that allows you to do wide pullups, like the one pictured here. Check, though, to make sure your doorway has enough room on the bar side to allow the wide grips to fit. For example, if you have cabinets really close to the door frame, the thing won’t fit, and you’ll need to get the kind without the wide grips.

Now when it comes to pushup stands, I do highly recommend Tony Horton’s. They are designed with a circular bottom so they won’t rollover during wide pushups.

Why use pushup stands? For me, that many pushups in a short period of time really overworks my wrists, and the pushup stands take a lot of that pressure off them. Also, you can add extra intensity by going lower into the pushup, if you use stands.

One of the things I don’t like about Tony’s workouts is that he uses the term “reverse-grip pullups” and also “chinups”. He surely knows what he’s talking about, but it’s confusing to me, so for the purposes of my routines, I use “chinups” to describe those exercises where your palms are facing you, and “pullups” for those exercises where your palms are facing away from you. Simple.

Here’s my Steve’s Chest & Back routine:

  1. Standard Grip Chinups – Hands slightly wider than shoulders
  2. Standard Width Pushups – Hands slightly wider than shoulders
  3. Wide Grip Pullups – Hands as far out as your pullup bar will allow
  4. Military Pushups – Hands right below shoulders, elbows stay near the body the entire move
  5. Close Grip Pullups – Hands less than shoulder width, maybe six inches apart
  6. Wide Pushups – Hands twice shoulder width
  7. Standard Pullup/Chinup Switch – Hands slightly wider than shoulders, switch between pullups and chinups every two reps
  8. Decline Pushups – Feet up on a chair, hands at standard width
  9. Close Grip Chinups – Hands less than shoulder width, maybe six inches apart
  10. Diamond Pushups – Fingers spread, index fingers and thumbs touching right below chest, elbows out, legs spread wide
  11. Wide Grip Pullups – Hands as far out as your pullup bar will allow
  12. Dive Bombers – Hands standard width, feet spread wide. Start with butt in the air. Move your nose and chest toward the floor, then come up on the other side, as if you are scooching under a fence. Then reverse the move and end up with your butt in the air. Like this guy.
  13. Parallel Pullups – These are with  your palms facing each other, if you have that kind of pullup bar. Otherwise, you can do some other kind of pullup/chinup
  14. Standard Width Pushups – Hands slightly wider than shoulders
  15. Standard Pullup/Chinup Switch – Hands slightly wider than shoulders, switch between pullups and chinups every two reps

Keys to pushups:

  • Do as many reps as you can for each exercise
  • If you feel that you want to do more, take a brief rest at the top and try a few more
  • Keep your core tight, no saggy body
  • Go all the way down
  • Come all the way up
  • Keep your elbows tight, pointed toward your feet, during military pushups

Keys to pullups/chinups:

  • Do as many reps as you can for each exercise
  • Do not hyperextend your arms
  • Only do one set of parallels (I’m pretty sure I got tendinitis a few years ago from doing too many of them)
  • If you are not good at them, and cannot do a lot of reps without stopping, do as many as possible in one minute, taking as many breaks as you need (this is what I do)
  • Keep doing them, you’ll get better
  • Don’t cheat by jumping, although I think a little leg kick is okay

Go ahead and give Steve’s Chest & Back a try and let me know how you like it!

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How to do pull ups, when you can’t do pull ups

If you are like me, you struggle with pullups. Pushups I can do, but those back exercises are difficult. In fact, when I did the fitness test before starting Tony Horton’s P90X, I was able to do 33 pushups, but only 1 pullup.

Hmmmmmm….

During P90X, Tony suggests doing chair-assisted pullups, where you do as many pullups as you can, then put your toe on a chair to help you do a few more.

This didn’t work well for me, because (1) all my usable chairs have wheels, and (2) the floor below my pullup bar is tile, so even trying to use a step stool was a problem, because it kept slipping.

I struggled with the step stool all the way through my first iteration of Tony Horton’s P90X. I tried repositioning it, putting something behind it, trying to keep it in place, but finally ended up with it right below my body, which pretty much removed a lot of the resistance and, therefore, rendered the exercise less useful.

As I continued the program and got tired of struggling with the stepstool, I tried using an exercise band, which is another option Tony suggests. Using the band did better for me, so I stuck with that for a while, but eventually I had to acknowledge that a rubber band just does not provide the resistance that a 180-pound body can. I had to start doing real pullups.

Problem was that I didn’t feel I could get enough work in during the time allotted on the DVDs. Tony is a pullup master, and he whips right through them, but I would end up quitting when I thought I still had a few in me.

The answer finally came to me. It takes a bit more time, and requires a pause if I’m using the DVDs, although often, these days, I do the workouts without them.

Here it is: I just do as many pullups as I can do in one minute. I can rest, kip, stand on the ground between each pullup, if I need to, but I do as many as I can do in one minute.

I use my battery operated kitchen timer, set it for a minute, and start the timer before each set. I don’t stop trying to do pullups before the beep.

This gives me the resistance I need to progress, and also gives me a number of real pullups to record, instead of chair assist or band method. Because real pullups are what I want to be doing, that works for me.

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Cardio — how much do we need?

How much cardio is enough to get your heart and lungs functioning as efficiently as possible? Hmmmm…. There are only two cardio days per week in Tony Horton’s P90X — Plyo and Kenpo, with the option to throw Cardio X into the mix if you like — but I had always heard that three times a week is the minimum to achieve at least minimal fitness. So is two times a week enough to build my heart and lungs?

I have, in my quest for fitness, read various things about cardio, and, while I can’t remember where I saw this, the following rings truest.

You are born with your heart a certain size. You are born with your lungs a certain size. They grow with your body, but you cannot manipulate them to be larger, i.e. working out does not make your heart and lungs grow, thereby making you more fit.

This makes sense to me. The heart and lungs are situated in your chest, behind ribs, so how can they get larger without banging into ribs. That can’t be right. This also helps me understand the phenomenon that I hear about every so often where an athlete is suffering from an “enlarged heart.” I had often wondered, “Isn’t that good? Wouldn’t we expect athletes to have enlarged hearts?”

If that is true, if your heart and lungs are what they are, how do we make them more efficient? I mean, they are getting more efficient as we work on our fitness, right? It is obvious without even formal measurement that, if we do P90X, we get better at Plyo and can go harder in Kenpo. If our heart and lungs are not growing, what’s going on?

You’ve probably guessed it: The muscles we use to do Plyo and Kenpo are getting better at doing those moves. This puts less stress on our heart and lungs, because with more efficient muscles, the heart and lungs can work less to feed them. This results in what we perceive to be improved functioning of our cardiovascular system. Sure, those activities are enhanced by our fitness, but what’s really happening is that our muscles are really the pieces of the system that are improved, so everything else that works to make them function works more efficiently, too.

And that is why the muscle confusion that Tony Horton stresses in P90X and One-On-One is so important. We have to do a variety of moves to achieve overall fitness. People who run all the time get really good at running, because their muscles are accustomed to the moves that occur when running, but when they are asked to do other things ….

I have personal anecdotal evidence of just this phenomenon.

When I was in the Air Force, we used to have to run 1.5 miles in a certain amount of time to pass our annual fitness test. Many of us, then, would run to stay in shape. Well, one year, someone higher up the chain of command came up with the idea to use bicycle fitness tests instead of making everyone run. They’d hook us up with a heart rate monitor and measure our pulse as we pedaled and the tester increased the tension on the stationary bike.

Many of us still passed the test, but there were a few runners who, for some reason, just could not. One guy — not the top runner among us, but up there — was a stand out. Everyone knew he was in shape. Just look at him! And he was still running, competing in half-marathons. Competing, mind you, not just completing. But he couldn’t pass the bike test.

He was really good at running. His muscles were used to those movements. But the bike test, not so much.

So you know what he did? He added some bicycling into his fitness routine. And you know what happened? After three months he passed his fitness test.

So, back to the original question: How much cardio we need to increase the efficiency of our hearts and lungs. Hmmmm…. Isn’t it obvious? If all this is true, and it seems to make sense, we don’t need any cardio to do that. We just need to build the muscles that we’ll be working, increase their efficiency, and the heart and lungs will work more efficiently, too.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t need cardio at all, because cardio does seem to, at the very least, improve brain function and lower stress levels, so gotta have that cardio. And if your goal is to be great at running, then, yeah run, run, run. But if you are shooting for general fitness, don’t forget to mix it up.