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It’s the weekend – to work out or not to work out

When I first started Tony Horton’s P90X about a year ago, I was motivated and ready to change my body. I pressed play every day, did some kind of workout seven days a week for the first 8 weeks. The 9th week, I took Sunday off. It is, after all, an optional workout day, and the workout is just stretching, so, really, Sunday is a recovery day. (BTW, this assumes you started the program on a Monday, which I’m guessing most people probably do.)

As my body moved more toward the shape I wanted, as I started feeling happier with it, and better about it, Saturday workouts, which for me was a cardio, would also sometimes slip.

In other words, I started treating the weekend days as optional workout days.

I don’t think that would work for my brother, who is a bit of a fitness nut, but it works for me.

Look, I work out pretty hard during the week. I don’t dog it. I’m pushing the boundaries of what my muscles can handle. I also tend not to get enough sleep. I need my downtime on the weekends to recover.

The only thing I really try to do on the weekend is one of my two weekly ab workouts — 15 minutes max — and that’s just to get something in, i.e. not be totally lazy for two whole days.

Then it’s up to my body and mind. What are they telling me?

Feeling sore? Maybe a cardio workout to loosen things up. Cardio is always good, because I always feel really great after, for example, Kenpo/Cardio Plus or Intervals, and I think it’s generally a good idea to get the blood circulating hard through the body every so often.

Feeling pretty good? How about a little yoga to improve strength, balance, breathing … you name it.

Yeah, those are both good ideas, and sometimes I’ll make ’em happen. But I don’t feel bad if I skip ’em.

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My experience with the Primal Diet

When I first started Tony Horton’s P90X, I followed the included diet plan religiously.

The plan called for a diet of 50% protein, 30% carbs, and 20% fat. I created a spreadsheet and entered everything I consumed, ensuring I kept my daily totals very close to those targets. I lost a lot of fat.

About six weeks after I’d started P90X, though, I read Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint. It intrigued me and made more sense to me than any other dietary lifestyle I’d ever read about.

If you are not familiar with Sisson’s philosophy, let me explain briefly that it involves eating lots of fat and protein, only some carbs, and those carbs should come primarily from vegetables, a bit from fruit, and not from anywhere else. No grains or sugars of any kind. The concept is that our bodies evolved to eat certain foods. Grains have not been part of our diets for very long, so when we eat grains, we are, essentially, eating things that our bodies are not accustomed to as food.

Because this made a lot of sense to me, I switched from the 50/30/20 diet to a primal diet after six weeks of P90X. I have been on the primal diet since then.

But now I’m switching back to 50/30/20.

Why?

While P90X has been great for getting me into shape, making me much more fit, and strengthening my muscles, well, dammit, my waist size has not budged from where it was ten weeks into the program, shortly after I went on the primal diet. I’ve been stuck. And it’s pissing me off.

I believe that our body composition is at least 80% what we eat, so I’ve thought for some time that I should make this move, go back to 50/30/20. Problem is, I really like primal eating and it’s a healthy way to eat. Plus primal does seem to be great for body-fat-percentage maintenance. But I guess that’s the problem. I’ve maintained my fat level, can’t seem to lose this fat around my gut.

I am not certain that primal is the cause of this lack of fat loss. But I’m back on 50/30/20, as of yesterday, to see if I can find out.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Can my knees handle the pounding of P90X and Insanity?

Knees. They are two of the most important joints in the body. We use them a lot and, so, they are subject to injury.

You may be wondering if your knees can handle P90X or Insanity. I wondered the same thing about my own knees.

I used to run a lot, but then my knees started to bother me. The incessant pounding running puts on your joints is tough on them, so I stopped.

When it came time for me to start P90X, I really wondered if my knees would be able to take it. After all, the Plyo workout includes a lot of high impact moves. Of course, there are modified moves for people concerned about the high impact nature of the routine, but I didn’t want to modify, if I didn’t have to. (Yeah, I can be stubborn — I am just not into this “getting too old for that” stuff.)

At first, good sense — based on Tony’s suggestions during the routine — got the better of me and I did do the modified moves. My knees had some issues, but nothing I couldn’t work through.

This is a good time to mention that you really need to listen to your body. You can tell if you are pushing too hard. You can tell if the pain you feel is something that you can work through or something that should make you stop.

As it turns out, I have a bit of arthritis in my left knee. It hurts, but exercise actually makes it feel better. Go figure.

Anyway, I made it all the way through P90X, eventually working up to the full high impact Plyo routine, and my knees are still intact. In fact, they are better off than before, because now the muscles around them are stronger.

I haven’t tried out Insanity yet. It has a lot more aerobics, and, so, a lot more knee-pounding. I will enter that program cautiously sometime later this year and report back on the results.

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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.