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How Does Insanity Affect Upper Body Strength?

When I started Insanity in early May, I was concerned about what it might do to my upper body strength. After all, the workouts really emphasized lower body and abs, and while there was some shoulder work, there was not a whole lot of concentration on the chest, arms, and lats.

I had toyed with the idea of adding some pullups to the workouts, but, what the heck, I figured I’d go ahead and experiment on myself yet again, and see just how Insanity affected my upper body.

And let me caveat this for any of you who think I am knocking Insanity — I’m not. I loved Insanity and recommend it to everyone!

Shaun T's InsanityNow, as you may know, I completed Insanity a couple weeks ago, took last week off to do only yoga, and started today with my favorite gauge of upper body strength: 30/15 from Tony Horton’s One-On-One workouts.

30/15 is a workout that alternates 12 sets of various pushups with 12 sets of various pullups, so it was measuring what I wanted to measure.

The results?

Pushups were barely affected. Prior to Insanity I was doing 26 pushups per set. Today I cut that back to 25, expecting to have to cut it further as the workout progressed toward the end, but, happily, I didn’t need to drop below 25 at all.

I did have to cheat a bit during the last couple sets, not going down quite all the way, to get to 25, but finish I did. I was pleased with that result. It won’t take long to get back to 26, and, in fact, I expect to be fully back next Monday when I do the 30/15 workout again.

I suppose this was to be expected. After all, Insanity does incorporate quite a few pushups in month two, so the chest and triceps are not totally ignored.

However, let’s talk about the lats.

During the pullup sets of 30/15, I do as many reps as I can do in one minute. Pullups are my weakness, so I try to maximize my workout by putting a time on it, instead of just doing them to simple failure.

My pullups were off 20% to 30%!

Again, this was to be expected. There are no pullups and no real lat work in Insanity, plus, my pullup numbers were not that impressive to begin with. Still….

To anyone who is concerned that Insanity will affect your pullups negatively, I can say that, if my experience is any indicator, then, yes, it does. You should add pullups and chinups to your Insanity workouts, or else expect to lose back strength.

Pushup strength is only mildly affected, so no worries there.

As I read through the literature that came with my freshly delivered copy of The Asylum, I saw that there is a pullup bar incorporated into those workouts, so I’ll be looking forward to that. My current plan is to start The Asylum in about a month, but we’ll see how that schedule holds up.

Right now, I am enjoying developing a Tony Horton’s P90X and Insanity hybrid, because the ones I’ve found online that others have created aren’t floating my boat. I’ll be incorporating Tony Horton’s One-On-One workouts into my hybrid. Look for that program here soon!

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Be accountable to yourself!

A fitness friend of mine recently retweeted something along the lines of “Write down your fitness goals, then share them with someone. That way the person can hold you accountable.”

WHAT?

I am familiar with this concept, and I guess it helps some people, but what is going on in the world when we need to make someone else hold us accountable for our own fitness? I am the one who needs to be fit, these are my goals.

I am accountable only to myself!

As a matter of fact, the only reason anyone besides my brother and my wife knew I was doing Tony Horton’s P90X when I first started it, was because my wife had told people at work, when P90X came up in conversation. I didn’t tell anybody. None of their business.

Now, I didn’t mind that my wife had told people, but I’m less social. Honestly, I never brought it up to people, because I didn’t want to have to converse about it. But I certainly didn’t need them to hold me accountable. I knew I was ready to get fit, and that I was going to get up and press play every day for 90 days. And I did. Accountable to no one but myself.

I am not on a soapbox here. Different strokes for different folks. If telling someone else about your goals helps you, please, by all means, do that. Anything that helps you stay on track is great!

But I will share with you my response to that original tweet from my fitness friend: “Grow the f*ck up Hold your own damn self accountable!”

At some point in our lives, we all need to figure out how to hold ourselves accountable. If we don’t, well, that’s how we get into trouble. We try to get away with stuff. We figure no one will ever know if we [insert something you should not do here]. Then, of course, at some point, someone does know, someone does find out, and … trouble. Divorce. Financial struggles. Legal problems.

I guess this has ended up being more of a rant than a fitness lesson, but, seriously, think about how well you hold your own self accountable for your actions. Live a strong life, hold yourself to high standards, and you will certainly sidestep a multitude of life’s problems.

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Insanity completed. Now what?

I finished Insanity. Didn’t bother with the final fit test. I had a big day scheduled for Sunday and didn’t really feel the need to record the final results. If you looked at the results of my last fit test, you can see that I had tremendous improvement from the start of the program, so I’m satisfied knowing that.

Now what?

Well … hmmmm … I ordered The Asylum.

I had not thought I would order it, but that’s because I didn’t understand what it is.

I had originally thought, “Insanity is hard enough. I can’t even do those moves all the way through. Why step it up with The Asylum?” Well, The Asylum focuses on preparing for sports — rather than just generic aerobic fitness, it adds some resistance training with weights, it only lasts 30 days, and, heck, it just looks interesting.

So I ordered it.

First, though, I will take this week off. Well, I mean, I’ll make it a yoga-only week. After the intense training and body pounding of the 9-week Insanity program, my body really needs a good rest.

I will follow that with two to four weeks of some kind of hybrid of P90X, One-On-One, and Insanity. I am not sure what that will look like yet, outside the fact that 30/15 will be part of it — I need to get those lats working again, and I can’t wait to resume doing pushups with my power stands.

Then I will enter … The Asylum.

I have been thinking about how I feel having completed Insanity. At first, I really felt a sense of accomplishment. I am sure that the vast majority of people do not make it through this program, so I do have an emotional boost, just having completed it.

But I’m over that. Can’t rest on that.

This whole quest for fitness I’ve been on keeps me wanting more, wanting to keep moving, pushing my body further.

And, dammit, I still have some fat to lose. Shaun T — the trainer who leads Insanity — really knows abs, and my abs are in great shape. Still wishing I could see them better.

I believe The Asylum also includes a new diet plan, so I will probably try that out for the 30-day span of the program. Maybe that will be the boost my body needs to lose these last few pounds of fat!

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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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Alcohol and Fitness

When I am talking with people about getting fit with Tony Horton’s P90X and Insanity, I always tell them that, while working out is very important to building your body, the most important thing to get straight is your diet.

Many times, one of the first questions they ask me is, “What about drinking? Do I need to quit drinking?”

Most fitness professionals I’ve read or spoken with would unhesitatingly answer “yes” to that question.

Sure, “yes” is the easy answer. Of course, you are trying to get fit. You should stop drinking. Drinking is bad for you. I know there are studies that show that one or two drinks a day are actually better for you than none, but do we really stop at one or two? My guess is that if you are asking me if you need to quit drinking, you probably go beyond one or two drinks quite regularly.

Let me tell you about my relationship with alcohol during my quest for fitness.

1) I need a drink to turn off.

There was a time in my life when my drinking life consisted of getting hammered at every opportunity, and, lemme tell ya, I had a lot of opportunities. So, I quit drinking totally for 18 months. It was not hard for me to do that. I decided to quit and I did.

But here’s the problem with that. I can’t slow down. I need to be on all the time. I am either working for money or working out or working for fun. I gotta be doing something.

In order for me to turn off, I need a drink, sometimes two, sometimes a few more than that.

My drinking is currently nowhere near what it was before my 18-month dry spell. That kind of drinking was stupid and self-destructive, not to mention expensive. But I do have a drink or two quite often, and I will have more than that a few times a year.

2) Drinking often makes me snack.

This is probably the biggest problem I have with drinking while trying to get fit. I can have bagel dogs in the freezer for months, but let me have a few drinks, and suddenly I gotta eat a couple of them. And a pizza. And some wings.

Drinking leads me down a path of very little resistance to many high-calorie foods. Those foods are not evil in and of themselves, but when it’s 11:30 at night and I’m packing away an extra 1000 to 1500 calories? That’s a bad idea.

3) Drinking can disrupt my sleep.

I’ve found that when I drink too much, I often wake up in the middle of the night, every few hours. I don’t feel rested the next morning.

Sleep is a very important factor in the fitness equation. You gotta give your body time to recover from the pounding you are giving it, and sleep is that recovery time. So anything that disrupts sleep should be avoided.

4) Hangovers make me not want to work out.

Fortunately, as I said above, I only rarely drink to the point that I may be hungover the next day, so this is not a major issue for me. In fact, on those occasions when I do plan to overindulge in adult beverages, I do not plan to work out the next day anyway.

5) I tend to drink vodka, dark beer, and red wine.

Vodka and my homemade limoncello, primarily. Vodka has no carbs. I like vanilla vodka with club soda. (Probably a girlie drink — my wife turned me on to it — but it’s tasty.) My homemade limoncello has a lot less sugar in it than that crap you buy at stores. And it’s authentic — I got it from an old man in Sorrento, Italy, the birthplace of limoncello. Everyone there apparently makes his own.

When I am out, which is often, because I go to see a lot of live bands in bars, I usually don’t drink. When I do drink, I have a dark beer or stout or red wine. Those are drinks I enjoy and they do not encourage fast drinking. I’ll only have a couple, because I need to drive home. If I am at a long event, I feel free to have more than a couple drinks, but never indulge to the point of intoxication.

With all these considerations factored in, I have still managed to get into the best shape of my life, all the while enjoying adult beverages.

Do you need to quit drinking to get fit? I don’t think so. Quitting might be the best way to go, but I am a regular guy who is trying to be in shape without being  too obsessive about this fitness stuff. And that means I’m gonna drink.

You may find that you need to quit for a bit in order to get yourself on track.

If you’re a beer drinker, you may want to switch to a low-carb beer, or to carb-free distilled spirits.

Or maybe you are cool with just quitting drinking and getting on with your life without alcohol.

Each of us needs to find our own balance. I’ve found mine. How about you?